The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and Its Censors in the High Middle Ages

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THE SILENT MASTERS

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THE SILENT MASTERS LATIN LITERATURE AND ITS CENSORS IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

Peter Godman

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON

,

NEW

PRESS

JERSEY

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COPYRIGHT © 2000 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA GODMAN, PETER THE SILENT MASTERS : LATIN LITERATURE AND ITS CENSORS IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES / PETER GODMAN. P.

CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEXES. ISBN 0-691-00977-5 (ALK. PAPER) 1. LATIN LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 2. LATIN LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN—CENSORSHIP. 3.

CENSORSHIP—EUROPE—HISTORY—TO 1500.

4. HUMANISTS—EUROPE.

I. TITLE. PA8030.C45G64

2000

363.3⬘1⬘0940902—DC21

99-35320

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GALLIARD THE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION MEETS THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (PERMANENCE OF PAPER). PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HTTP://PUP.PRINCETON.EDU 1

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ROBERTO ANTONELLI AMICO LEPIDISSIMO

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Neque solum oportet ut cum aequalibus viventibusque contendamus, sed cum iis etiam, qui olim scripserunt, quos mutos magistros appellamus; alioqui futuri semper infantes. CELIO CALCAGNINI, De imitatione (ad ﬁn.)

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix ABBREVIATIONS xxi I

The Silencer and the Silenced

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II

Unbuttoned Dwarves 32 III

Teaching by Fire and Sword

61

IV

Smoldering Firebrands

107

V

Soft Beatings

149

VI

Archness

191

VII

The Open Work

228

VIII

The Polymath and the Fool

294

IX

The Handle of the Knife

334

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY SOURCES 349 INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

357

GENERAL INDEX 363

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PREFACE

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ELIO CALCAGNINI, friend of Erasmus and inspiration of Rabelais, was a diplomat and a soldier, a poet and a professor in the course of his active life (1479 –1541). His interests ranged from Aristotle’s meteorology to the ethnography of the Ukraine and the game of chess. He composed a verse encomium on laughter, a prose invective against heresy, and a lively tract on the theory of imitation, from which the epigraph to this book is taken. Always curious, never complacent, Calcagnini wrote much and published little. Would a study of this singular humanist not be more instructive, more amusing than a monograph on an array of medieval masters, silent or otherwise? No, no, replies the medievalist. Speaking about the High Middle Ages, we are discussing humanism. Was there not a renaissance in the twelfth century? Do not the rebirth of science, the revival of scholarship, the recovery of the classics point to the emergence, much earlier than Jacob Burckhardt thought, of humanist culture? Each of these metaphors implies a turningback to standards set by antiquity; each of them was used by the humanists of the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries to denigrate their medieval predecessors. Direct alignment between the achievements of the classical past and the aspirations of the Renaissance present naturally entailed imposing a caesura between them—naturally, because before there can be rebirth, there must be death. From beyond the grave to which their period was consigned by this crude but tenacious ideology of renaissance, the voices of revolting medievalists were lifted in protest. Humanism, by a fatal symmetry, counted among the ﬁrst of their slogans. Adopted to combat the tyranny of an alien model, it has merely served to strengthen its hold. Nor, despite the strain displayed by such weary rhetoric, is there any indication that it is soon to be laid to rest. Still alive and kicking itself into contortions of paradox, it has recently produced something called, in deﬁance of oxymoron, “scholastic humanism,” from which it derives the uniﬁcation of Europe. Neither Europe’s unity nor any other cause is advanced by the muddled humbug of humanism. Why not jettison such ballast? Sinking beneath the weight of its anachronism, unmissed and unmourned, it leaves us free to consider the twelfth century in its own terms. They were different from those of the ﬁfteenth. Take a central issue on which comparisons, favorable and less ﬂattering, have been drawn between them: the imitation of the classics. In the last sentence of his work on that subject quoted in the epigraph, Calcagnini likens himself and his contemporaries to children. Although they might grow and develop, their relationship to the ancients

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would remain one of son to father. Petrarch, hardly inclined to underestimate his own worth, thought in terms of the same analogy of dependence. It was not new. Peter Abelard, in the twelfth century, had already seen the problem. Assured about his own powers, he doubted the capacity of others to recognize them. Deploring an anxiety of inﬂuence that he ascribed less to himself than to those who stood in awe of antiquity, Abelard inclined to a cultural pessimism not shared by Bernard of Chartres. Bernard—for some, a foil to Abelard—conceived of his generation as dwarves on the shoulders of giants. Underlying that ambiguous simile was a conﬁdence in twelfth-century modernism which John of Salisbury used to justify his own intellectual enterprise. Perched on the vantage-point gained from these towering exemplars, he and others could see further. At humanism, in the imitative forms practiced by many writers of the Renaissance, John would have curled his lip. He was not a purist but a pluralist; and if his knowledge of Cicero was deep, he had no time for the servility of Ciceronianism. Writing, in the Metalogicon, his own version of the philosophical history of the early twelfth century, John of Salisbury portrayed his teachers and fellow-students with acerbic irony. Almost no one was spared the sting of his sarcasm—not even Aristotle, who interested John chieﬂy for the uses to which he could be put. But if veneration is missing from his attitude to antiquity and the present, there is one ﬁgure in the recent past whom this convinced modernist treated with respect. His silent master was Bernard of Chartres. Bernard had many advantages. Not the least of them was that he had never known John of Salisbury, best of students and worst of pupils. To the one magister with whom he had not had the opportunity to fall out, John ascribed a manifesto of independence. The twelfth-century scholar had to be informed about the classics, declared Bernard (as the Metalogicon reports), in order to surpass them. Once overtaken, however, they could be left behind. Assimilated and recast, the logic of Aristotle was to serve the interests of a different, by no means inferior, culture. And if that culture needed its own heroes, why turn to Greek or Roman antiquity? At a safe distance from the Paris where John had studied, Bernard had taught his admirer’s own teachers. The school led by this aged master from the provinces, as his rival Hugh of Saint-Victor referred to him with feline condescension, is accordingly elevated by the Metalogicon into a locus amoenus of the intellect. At Chartres John of Salisbury imagined an alternative to the Paris of his own generation. Far from the strife and aridity that he decried in the capital, that once-celebrated center of learning could be made to stand for an approach, typiﬁed in John’s own person, which was developing outside the Parisian schools. A new type of intellectual is adumbrated in the writings of John of Salisbury. Neither a master nor a monk nor a protohumanist, he is the ﬁgure

P R E F AC E

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extolled between the lines of the Metalogicon. More polemical and pointed than is commonly thought, that splendid book depicts a thinker educated in Paris by frauds, fools, and failures. Looking beyond them for his modern model to a cathedral school of twelfth-century France that had already been surpassed, when John of Salisbury wrote, by the mini-metropolis, he re-created in his own image a past he knew only at nostalgic second hand. Like Socrates, the enlightened disciplinarian Bernard of Chartres had taught that a degree of ignorance was an advantage. Discriminate learning should be combined in an interdisciplinary ideal, maintaining the unity of knowledge while respecting the distinctness of its constituent parts. That ideal—known in antiquity as enkyklios paideia and called, in the twelfth century, concordantia artium—held a potent appeal for intellectuals who were being disparaged or attacked. Justifying the scholar’s claim to treat the various branches of learning without incurring the charge of trespassing onto territory not his own, concordantia artium served as his bulwark against the assaults of enemies and the misunderstandings of the plebs. In this concept, both defensive and ambitious, was focused one of the central tensions in the learned culture of the High Middle Ages: that between the desire, on the part of suspect magistri, to be recognized as hierophants of comprehensive scholarship and their urge to withdraw into the safety of elitism. That tension was not resolved until, in the generation after John’s, regulation was imposed from above and the institution of the university replaced the ideal of concordantia artium. Moribund by the end of our period, it had become a joke in the age of scholasticism. Scholasticism has its own teleology. The twelfth century is often regarded as a prelude to the thirteenth, and developments that diverge from this pattern are ignored. The omission is understandable. The untidiness of the High Middle Ages—the difﬁculty, for example, of ﬁtting into recognized categories some of its experimental writings—stands in contrast to the order of the scholastic system. Order, rather than the arduous task of attempting a new literary history of this period, concerns the discipline that is called Medieval Latin. Distinguished by its fondness for formalism and preference for detail, it is generally content with the simpliﬁcations of the systematic approach, the grand vistas of rhetorical continuity, or the bird’seye view. Loath to rise above the verbal level of the text, Medieval Latin, as presently practiced, seldom considers the relationship between literature and cultural change. Yet it was to change—unsettling in its rapidity, intensity, and force—that some of the most sophisticated writing of the eleventh and twelfth centuries responded. The connection was neither mechanical nor causal. While it is true that art—the greatest art—transcends the circumstances of its production, the text also possesses a context that informs its character and

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affects its function. Neither can be grasped solely in philological or literary terms, indispensable though both methods are to the study of those who, in the High Middle Ages, employed the language of learning. Latin furnished an optic through which authors perceived reality; and when they treated topics of contemporary relevance, the perspectives—classical, biblical, and patristic—offered by their medium shaped their vision of the present. If actuality, shaped and stylized by the legacy of the past, is a recurrent theme in this period, none of its major writers set out to play games with words. Capable of more than ringing the changes on topoi learned in the schools, they struck out in new directions and explored the borderland between what are now distinct disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, and history. That is why the modern category of belles lettres, narrowly understood in its literary sense, is replaced in this book by the older and broader concept of litteratura, to encompass the various types of writing practiced by intellectuals who ventured beyond conventional boundaries of form, genre, and theme. Emphasis is accordingly placed on their senses of limit, their ideas of control. Control implies authority—not only that of the author but also, in a clerical culture, that of his ecclesiastical superiors. If their understanding of the ﬁnes inadmissible to violate ﬁgures prominently in what follows, equal attention is paid to the opposite—to rebellion against auctoritas, subversion of clichés, and openness—the last a quality shared, in a measure unsuspected by Umberto Eco, by twelfth- and twentieth-century thought. Not by chance does the title of the longest chapter (VII) in The Silent Masters allude to Eco’s Opera aperta. Openness, with its attributes of ambiguity and indeterminacy dear to postmodernist tastes, is embodied in the oeuvre of Bernardus Silvestris. This phenomenon has hardly been heeded, perhaps because it is difﬁcult to see in context. The problem is not just that even Bernardus’s Cosmographia, one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the High Middle Ages, still lacks a published edition that is fully critical, a commentary, or an interpretation placing this text in the wider setting of his writings and period. The further and deeper difﬁculty is that the Cosmographia, more often described than analyzed, appears to belong nowhere. Is this work philosophy, theology, or literature? How to account for an accomplished stylist who, privileging content over form, was able to think with disarming originality? And when he thought and wrote, like Bernardus Silvestris, in a mode that was deliberately elusive and polyvalent, how to convey the nature of his achievement in an age bent on univocality? Although an answer to these questions is attempted below, the view advanced there of Bernardus’s adventurousness and subtlety does not lead to the conclusion that he can or should be represented as a loner. Addressing, in

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xv

prose and in verse, issues that concerned other intellectuals, he, like them, was aware that he was practicing what was classiﬁed, in the hierarchies of knowledge that held sway during the High Middle Ages, as the lowest of the artes. None of the writers examined in this book subscribed to the romantic postulate of literature’s autonomy. They sought to assimilate their work to the “higher” disciplines, while afﬁrming its own status and value, or they presented it as an alternative to a prevailing ideology. If the prime example of the ﬁrst tendency in the twelfth century is the Cosmographia, the supreme instance of the second is the verse of the Archpoet. Both were composed by thinkers alert to the urgency with which their contemporaries were discussing problems of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, as interpreted by its ﬁrst and best exponent in the Christian tradition, ought to entail dissent. Nam oportet et haereses esse, argued that consummate dialectician, Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 11: 19), and heresy, inseparable twin of the established faith, looms large in high medieval debate. Both a concrete phenomenon and a cultural metaphor, heresy involved evasion or deﬁance of control. By whom, how, and why that control was to be exercised raised difﬁculties for the clerical writer. Censorship, not only in its repressive forms, gained fresh prominence in their work—fresh but not new, because many of the ideas and practices restored or adapted during the two trials of Peter Abelard derived from earlier traditions, chieﬂy those of the ancient church. Yet his cause célèbre marked a turning-point. Before and after Abelard’s condemnation in 1141, controversy turned on self-regulation by individual scholars and on sanctions imposed by the ecclesiastical authorities. A measure of intellectual power with responsibility was the aim of Robert of Melun, who expressed, more eloquently than many who shared this opinion, the contentiousness of Bernard of Clairvaux’s claim to speak in the name of the church. For what, asked Robert of Melun, was the church in the “reformation of the twelfth century?” Wracked by schism, buffeted by conﬂict between the old and the new religious orders, threatened by heresy outside the fold and menaced by dissent within, its members sought the guidance of a higher authority that the weakened papacy and divided episcopate could not always provide. For their enfeebled auctoritas, Bernard substituted his own. Deferring, both sincerely and ambiguously, to his hierarchical superiors, he played the part of guardian of the faith and anticipated the role of grand inquisitor. In this he was matched by Peter Abelard—not Bernard’s victim but his rival. Their struggle exposed a paradox that had begun to emerge during the eleventh century. In the absence of criteria of veriﬁcation and the lack of effective oversight, charges of heterodoxy and claims to exercise magisterium could be raised so recklessly that the ﬁgures of the scholar-heretic and the inquisitor were becoming interchangeable.

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One man’s saint, by a facile inversion of arguments, was another’s schismatic. Polemic about the doctrines of the faith had exceeded the bounds of control by 1141, and scholarship reacted by attempting to impose its own limits. The magistri, viewed with suspicion by their enemies outside the schools, such as Gerhoch of Reichersberg and William of Saint-Thierry, now asserted that the application of learned methods was essential not only in determining the truth but also in the detection of mistakes. A case for the permissibility of error—one of the central problems with which Abelard grappled after his ﬁrst condemnation in 1121—was argued at the same time as scholarly criteria were being formulated as qualiﬁcations for high ecclesiastical ofﬁce. Which did not lead to a straightforward victory of “the schools” over “the cloister.” If Gerhoch and William represented one body of opinion among the spirituales, Bernard of Clairvaux—too often and too simply aligned with monastic opposition to the magistri—stood for another. His inﬂexibility has been exaggerated; his adaptability and shrewdness underrated. Already during the conﬂict of 1140–41 with Abelard, he had begun to develop his own version of the magisterial attributes that he censured in others, and after his unacknowledged defeat at the trial of Gilbert of Poitiers in 1148, the process accelerated. Yet if Bernard’s alternative form of intellectuality owed much to the model he professed to reject, its defenders and adapters, from William of Conches to Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury, were not content with a partial success. They bequeathed to Alan of Lille a legacy of comprehensiveness on which he based his equation of the polymath with the arbiter of orthodoxy. The debate about orthodoxy during the High Middle Ages provided a context in which the laboratory of literature produced some of its boldest experiments. Not all of them were deemed suitable for the international res publica litterarum. The Ruodlieb, for example, remained conﬁned to the audience for which it was originally composed, while the verse of the Archpoet was directed to an exclusive but militant circle that opposed the reformers and their allies at Rome. A distinction begins to emerge, in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, between “private” writing, addressed to the members of a monastic community or an imperial chancery, and “public” compositions issued with the approval of ecclesiastical authority. That distinction was drawn by methods and metaphors of censorship which reveal clerical authors’ awareness of the ecclesiological implications of their work. Voluntarily undertaken or enforced by others, censura remained a central issue for intellectuals long after the end of this period. That is why, if Abelard’s tribulations arose less from the content than from the context of his writings, his experience as a heretic, condemned but rehabilitated, ﬁnds parallels in that of Galileo. The same phe-

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nomena recur, because the problems considered here are of longue durée. The caesura, or optical illusion, of a renaissance does not help us to perceive them, nor can they be seen with the dewy gaze of a humanist. Let us attempt instead to look at the High Middle Ages with the disabused scrutiny of an inquisitor.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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N THE ARCHIVES of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, as it was once known, there is an account of the tribunal at Naples, written by Giuseppe Valletta and dedicated to Pope Innocent XII (1691– 1700). One of the most fascinating features of this unpublished document is its historical sense. Tracing the course of heresy up to the High Middle Ages, Valletta discerned a turning-point in the twelfth century. For him, the Patarenes and Waldensians, the Cathars and Albigensians had been scourges of an ecclesiastical polity weakened by the investiture crisis. But they were not alone. “Molti scolastici” reinforced their subversive efforts, with the result that the church was no less tormented by philosophers’ disputes than by armed conﬂicts (“in modocche la nostra Chiesa non meno fu travagliata dalle armi, che dagli argomenti de Filosoﬁ”). That was when the virgula censoria began to be wielded. Understanding of the parallel development of inquisition and censorship, attested in the Holy Ofﬁce at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, also found form in repertories of decretals. One of the most ample, compiled during the pontiﬁcate of Pius VI (1775–99), traces ecclesiastical censura librorum back to the reign of Alexander IV (1254–61) who, in this area as in others, assimilated and extended decisions taken by his predecessors. Although the inquisitors of the Enlightenment thought in legalistic terms, they were aware that censorship and the struggle against heresy had led a common life long before being centralized at Rome in the Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books and in the Holy Ofﬁce. Such was the thesis presented by Charles Du Plessis d’Argentré in his Collectio iudiciorum de novis erroribus (1728– 36), which begins with the twelfth century. From a different standpoint, this book argues that Valletta and Du Plessis d’ Argentré were right. Interrupted by a study of Florentine humanism, recently published, and by one of the censorship of the Inquisition and the Index, now about to appear, The Silent Masters has changed in the interval. Prolonged exposure to humanism taught me what the twelfth century was not, and reﬂection on primary sources of the Catholic Reformation indicated what it was to become. If those enamored of renaissances ﬁnd little for them in the following pages, that is due to the self-styled humanists of the ﬁfteenth century, many of whom seem to me insufferable, and to the censors and inquisitors of the sixteenth who, in their sympathetic rigor, dispelled some of my illusions. Others were corrected or conﬁrmed by colleagues and friends who kindly read a ﬁrst draft. Special thanks are due to Frank Bezner, Leonard

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Boyle, Marcia Colish, John Frymire, Peter von Moos, and John Ward. Without the intelligent assistance of John Frymire, Franziska Kuenzelen, and Michael Rupp, my work would never have reached even its present imperfect state. Tribute is paid to the lesson of three masters at whose feet I wish that I had been able to sit: Peter Classen, Herbert Grundmann and, above all, the incomparable Yves Congar. Preliminary studies, altered and expanded in this book, have appeared in Poetica, Studi Medievali, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, and in volumes edited by Walter Haug and Burghardt Wachinger and by Michelangelo Picone and Bernhard Zimmermann, respectively. Completed in the ﬂeshpots of Vienna, to which I was lured by my friend Gotthard Wunberg, The Silent Masters has also beneﬁted from the tranquil and stimulating atmosphere of the Internationales Forschungszentrum (Kulturwissenschaften). My warm thanks are due to that institute and its excellent staff. Dedicated to Roberto Antonelli, with affection and gratitude for many kindnesses, this book has been written to enable him to distinguish, among the heresies of homonyms, which Peter is which.

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ABBREVIATIONS

AHDLM Cambridge History CCCM CCSL Constable, Reformation Curtius, ELLMA

DA IMU MGH MlJb MS PL RTAM Renaissance and Renewal

SM von Moos, Geschichte als Topik

World of John of Salisbury

Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy. Ed. P. Dronke (Cambridge, 1988). Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina G. Constable. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996). E. R. Curtius. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 6th ed. Trans. W. Trask with an afterword by P. Godman (Princeton, 1990). Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters Italia Medioevale e Umanistica Monumenta Germaniae Historica Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch Mediaeval Studies Patrologia Latina Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable, with C. D. Lanham (Oxford, 1982). Studi Medievali P. von Moos. Geschichte als Topik. Das rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die historiae im “Policraticus” Johannes von Salisbury. Ordo. Studien zur Literatur und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters und in der frühen Neuzeit 2 (Hildesheim, 1988). The World of John of Salisbury. Ed. M. Wilkes. Studies in Church History 3 (Oxford, 1994).

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THE SILENT MASTERS

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I THE SILENCER AND THE SILENCED

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HAT DUBIOUS DUO, Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, had many qualities in common. Determination and drive combined, in them both, with high intelligence and a low urge toward self-publicity. Convinced of his mission, each of them wished to have his way.— which led, by different but parallel routes, to the goal of magisterium.1 Authority—doctrinal, spiritual, and intellectual—in the twelfth-century church was the end to which Abelard and Bernard strived. Compelling in argument and persuasive in eloquence, they shared a conﬁdence in the written word at variance with their mistrust of the spoken one. Silence, not speech, was a duty of these two monks. Sins of the tongue posed mortal perils for their souls.2 A long tradition, reaching from the Rule of the Master to the Rule of Saint Benedict and the commentaries on them, attached cardinal importance to this point of discipline.3 Submission, expressed in the practice of speechlessness, was to be cultivated not only by male followers of the path of perfection. Abelard, in the rule that he composed for the Paraclete, urged silence on the nuns whose abbess was Heloise.4

1 For the concept, see best Y. Congar, “Pour une histoire sémantique du terme magisterium,” and “Bref historique des formes du magistère et de ses relations avec les docteurs,” in his Droit ancien et structures ecclésiales (London, 1982), pp. 85– 98. Cf. B. Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge. Remarques sur les censures doctrinales à l’époque moderne (Naples, 1993), pp. 35ff., and G. Olsen, “The Theologian and the Magisterium: The Ancient and Medieval Background of a Contemporary Controversy,” Communio 7 (1980):292– 319. For the contemporary perspective, see Cardinal J. Ratzinger, “The Church and Scientiﬁc Theology,” Communio 7 (1980):332– 42 and idem., “The Church and Theologians,” Origins 15, May 8, 1986, pp. 761–70. Sober discussion of the controversy is found in Cooperation between Theologians and Ecclesiastical Magisterium, ed. L. O’ Donovan (Washington, 1982). 2 Cf. C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, I peccati della lingua: Disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome, 1987). 3 On the theme in general, see P. von Moos, “Occulta cordis. Contrôle de soi et confession au Moyen Age, I. Formes du silence,” Médiévales 29 (1995):131– 40 [⫽ “Herzensgeheimnisse (occulta cordis), Selbstbewahrung und Selbstentblössung im Mittelalter (Beitrag zum VI. Kolloquium der Studiengruppe ‘Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation’),” in Schleier und Schwelle, 1: Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation, ed. A. and J. Assmann (Munich, 1997), pp. 89–109] and P. Gehl, “Competens silentium: Varieties of Monastic Silence in the Medieval West,” Viator 18 (1987):125 – 60. Cf. A. Wathen, OSB, Silence. The Meaning of Silence in the Rule of Saint Benedict, Cistercian Studies 22 (Washington, D.C., 1973), pp. 99–112. 4 T. P. McLaughlin, ed., “Abelard’s Rule for Religious Women,” MS 18 (1956): 241– 92.

4

CHAPTER I

Idle and superﬂuous talk—the multiloquium that Saint Augustine and Solomon (Proverbs 10:19) damned—was, for Abelard, the opposite of silence, on which Benedict had commanded monks to concentrate.5 What the saint wished to encourage was not a passive habit but an active virtue. Self-control was essential to life in the cloister, for the tongue, root of all evil, was capable of destroying religion. If words served as the medium of human communication, it was in thought or prayer that one spoke with God; and nuns were to be in no doubt about the proper partner for their meditative dialogues.6 Absorbed in devotion to the divine message, they should eliminate speech from the oratory and the dormitory, the refectory and the kitchen—recurring, if necessary for practical purposes, to sign-language. Against “the pest of words,” Abelard prescribed an antidote virulent enough to create models of muteness at the Paraclete.7 His insistence on silence, more emphatic and speciﬁc than that of Saint Benedict himself, ﬁnds parallels in the statutes drawn up for Cluny by Peter the Venerable.8 They prescribe, in greater detail than earlier rules, where and when the monks, by their speechlessness, were to demonstrate that they had regained the fervor that had once transformed the religious life of Europe.9 Desire for reform inspired both the prince of a church that counted among the most splendid foundations in Christendom and the failed abbot of Saint-Gildas in Britanny—on his own account, one of the most squalid.10 There an Abelard notorious for his pride had explained to his unreceptive brethren that they should proclaim, by their humility, obedience to God. To illustrate divine power, this magister, after his return to teach theology and philosophy at Paris during the 1130s, chose an example that reveals much about his mentality. Like “the thrones of kings,” begins one of the hymns that Peter Abelard then composed for the Paraclete, even the “exalted chairs of philosophical magisterium” were subject to “the yoke of 5

“Omni tempore silentium debent studere monachi.” Regula 42, La Règle de saint Benoît, 5th ed., ed. P. Schmitz, (Turnhout, 1987), p. 98. 6 “Plus quippe esse constat silentio studere quam silentium habere. Est enim studium vehemens applicatio animi ad aliud gerendum. Multa vero negligenter agimus vel inviti, sed nulla studiose nisi volentes vel intenti.” McLaughlin, ed., “Abelard’s Rule,” p. 245. 7 Ibid., p. 246. 8 Statuta 19–22, ed. G. Constable, Consuetudines benedictinae variae (saec. xi.-saec. xii), in Corpus consuetudinum monasticorum 6 (Siegburg, 1975), pp. 57– 60, with Constable, Cluniac Studies (London, 1968), pp. 21–25, 119 – 38. 9 Statuta, 22, p. 60, with Constable, Consuetudines benedictinae variae, p. 57, note (ad ﬁn.). Cf. D. Knowles, “The Reforming Decrees of Peter the Venerable,” in Petrus Venerabilis 1156–1956, ed. G. Constable and J. Kritzeck, Studia Anselmiana 40 (Rome, 1956), pp. 1– 20. 10 See below, pp. 81ff. and cf. J. Miethke, “Abelards Stellung zur Kirchenreform. Eine biographische Studie,” Francia 1 (1973), pp. 158 – 92.

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the Lord.” Writing to his namesake, less as an individual than as a type representative of the schools (scholasticus), Peter the Venerable had urged him to abandon secular learning for “true”—for Christian—philosophy.12 “Let human presumption fall silent,” admonished the abbot of Cluny in the spirit of his statutes, “and the divine magisterium be heard.”13 From the schools to the cloister, the same message had been proclaimed by Abelard who, after being censured at Sens in 1140 and condemned at Rome in the following year, entered Cluny and put his theory into practice. How, is described in a letter to Heloise by Peter the Venerable, shedding light on the monastic culture he shared with a reformed heretic: That servant of Christ and truly Christian philosopher, Master Peter, whose name, I say, should be mentioned often and always honorably, was sent by God’s plan, in the last years of his life, to Cluny which, in his person and by his presence, he enriched with a gift more precious than “any gold or topaz.” It is impossible to explain, in brief compass, how holy, humble, and devout was his way of life among us, as any Cluniac will fully conﬁrm. Unless I am mistaken, I do not recall seeing anyone to compare with him in such humility of dress and bearing that, to a just observer, even [Saint] Germain would not have seemed more lowly, nor [Saint] Martin more impoverished. Although at my insistence he held a higher rank among the brethren gathered here in large numbers, he always appeared the last and least in clothing, to which he paid not the slightest attention. Even in processions when he, as is customary, went before me with the others, I was often surprised and almost astounded that a man of such fame and repute could neglect his appearance and abase himself to such a degree. For while there are some who, professing to be religious, desire the very habit of religion which they wear to be excessively sumptuous, he was exceedingly sparing in such matters and, satisﬁed with a simple garb of any kind, sought nothing more. In food, drink, and all 11 “Regium solia, / philosophici / celsas cathedras / magisterii / hi subiciunt / iugo Domini.” Peter Abelard’s Hymnarius Paracletensis 2, ed. J. Szövérffy (Albany, 1975), pp. 186, 187,1. 12 Ibid., 2, p. 102, with Ep. 9 and 10 in The Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, ed. G. Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 14 –17. The arguments against this identiﬁcation by P. Zerbi, “‘In Cluniaco vestra sibi perpetuam mansionem elegit’ (Petri Venerabilis Epistola 98). Un momento decisivo nella vita di Abelardo dopo il concilio di Sens,” in Zerbi, Tra Milano e Cluny. Momenti di vita e cultura ecclesiastica nel secolo xiio, 2 ed. (Rome, 1978), pp. 303 – 95 carry no weight. Even if the letter is to be dated after August 1122, when Abelard had already become a monk, the term scholasticus was still applicable, in the sense of “one exercising a teaching ofﬁce.” Cf. Hilary of Orléans, who described the community gathered at the Paraclete as a schola, p. 73 and n. 73. On the expression Christian philosophy, cf. J. Leclercq, “Pour l’ histoire de l’ expression ‘philosophie chrétienne’,” Mélanges des sciences religieuses 9 (1952), pp. 221–26 and H. Rochais, “Ipsa Philosophia Christus,” MS 13 (1951), pp. 244–47. 13 Ep. 9 in Letters of Peter the Venerable, p. 15.

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matters of bodily hygiene he never swerved from this course, rejecting not what I should call surplus to his needs but everything that was not absolutely essential to them, thereby setting a personal and general example in word and deed. He studied assiduously, prayed frequently, and maintained unbroken silence, unless he was compelled to speak in private conversations among the monks or to address them publicly, in chapter, about the divine ofﬁce.14

The silence of Abelard at Cluny was interrupted only on the occasions sanctioned by the statutes. Not the disputationes or debates about logic, dialectic, and theology, which this master in the schools of Paris had once been so eager to provoke, but collationes or “conversations” among likeminded brethren on reading, accompanied by meditation and prayer, led him to depart from the habit of taciturnitas.15 Silence expressing Abelard’s submission and demonstrating his conversion, Peter the Venerable refashioned the image of the rebel and appropriated it to his own ends. “Perpetual silence” had been imposed on Abelard, by Innocent II, in

14

“De illo, inquam, sepe ac semper cum honore nominando servo ac vere Christi philosopho, magistro Petro, quem in ultimis vitae suae annis, eadem divina dispositio Cluniacum transmisit et eam in ipso et de ipso super omne aurum et topazion munere cariore ditavit. Cuius sanctae, humili, ac devotae inter nos conversationi, quod quantumve Cluniacus testimonium ferat, brevis sermo non explicat. Nisi enim fallor, non recolo vidisse me illi in humilitatis habitu et gestu similem, in tantum ut nec Germanus abiectior, nec ipse Martinus bene discernenti pauperior appareret. Cumque in magno illo fratrum nostrorum grege, me compellente, gradum superiorem teneret, ultimus omnium vestitu incultissimo videbatur. Mirabar sepe et in processionibus eo me cum reliquis pro more praecedente pene stupebam tanti tamque famosi nominis hominem sic se ipsum contempnere, sic se abiicere posse. Et quia sunt quidam religionis professores, qui ipsum, quem gerunt habitum religiosum, nimis esse cupiunt sumptuosum, erat ille prorsus parcus in istis et cuiusque generis simplici veste contentus, nil ultra quaerebat. Hoc et in cibo, hoc et in potu, hoc et in omni cura corporis sui servabat, et non dico superﬂua, sed et cuncta nisi valde necessaria, tam in se quam in omnibus, verbo pariter et vita dampnabat. Lectio erat ei continua, oratio frequens, silentium iuge, nisi cum aut fratrum familiaris collatio aut ad ipsos in conventu de divinis publicus sermo eum loqui urgebant.” Ibid., ep. 115, pp. 306 –7. All translations, here and elsewhere in this book, are my own. On this letter, see P. von Moos, Consolatio. Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliteratur über den Tod und zum Problem der christlichen Trauer 1 (Munich, 1971), pp. 277–78 and id., “Le Silence d’ Héloise et les idéologies modernes,” in Pierre Abélard. Pierre le Vénérable. Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du xiie siècle (Paris, 1975), pp. 425– 68, esp. 443 – 40 with C. H. Kneepkens, “There Is More in a Biblical Quotation Than Meets in the Eye: On Peter the Venerable’s Letter of Consolation to Heloise,” in Media Latinitas. Essays . . . L. Engels, ed. R. Nip (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 89 – 100. 15 See J. Leclercq, “La Récréation et le colloque dans la tradition monastique,” Revue d’ ascétique et de mystique 43 (1967), pp. 3–20; id., “The Renewal of Theology,” in Renaissance and Renewal, pp. 69 – 87, esp. 82– 83 and id., Recueil d’études sur saint Bernard et ses écrits 5 (Rome, 1992), pp. 237ff.

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1141.16

What the pope then decreed as a punitive measure, the abbot of Cluny now describes as voluntary obedience. The heretic had been condemned at the court of Rome, as he had been censured twenty years earlier at the council of Soissons, for the “public” nature of his teaching.17 Outside the conﬁnes of the clergy, Abelard had diffused, without license, his pernicious doctrines. Placing the offender in a different context, Peter the Venerable redeﬁnes the key term of the papal sentence. “Publicly,” in the strict sense of an address to his brothers, this model monk was allowed, or compelled, to interpret problems posed by the lectio divina. Before a gathering of the cloistered community—not on the “highways and byways,” where Abelard’s enemies alleged that he had spread his message— he recurred to the spoken word, but, when he did so, it was never on his own initiative. The control that, as a master in the schools, he had seemed to defy was now accepted by him willingly. That change was due to the inﬂuence of a protector who had long been active in his interests. After Innocent II had ordered Abelard and his accomplice, Arnold of Brescia,18 to be conﬁned separately in religious houses, Peter the Venerable had requested that this “man of religion and learning” should be allowed to remain at Cluny,19 adducing the offender’s age and inﬁrmity as reasons for mitigation of the sentence. Not satisﬁed with a miseratio, Peter was able to produce a trump card, for he had succeeded in making peace between the prosecuted and his prosecutor. And Bernard of Clairvaux, reconciled with Abelard, was in Peter’s mind when he depicted this penultimate stage in a complex process of rehabilitation. Begun with his two letters to Petrus scholasticus urging him to become a “Christian philosopher,” it was continued with a third announcing to the pope that concord had been achieved between Abelard and his adversary. In the open epistle to Heloise, Peter’s good ofﬁces are shown to have taken effect, and the submission of his protégé, reﬂected in his ﬂawless conduct, signaled Abelard’s return to the bosom of the church. These four letters are complemented by a ﬁfth that transmitted the absolution of her former husband to the abbess of the Paraclete. Promising to do what he could at a time when employment prospects were bleak, to ﬁnd a job for Astralabe, son of Heloise and Abelard,20 Peter the Venerable ended by taking the entire family under his wing. The aegis of Cluny thus placed over the leading characters in the drama, 16

For the judgment and its context see below, pp. 93 – 103. See below, pp. 70 – 72. 18 See below, pp. 135 – 37. 19 Ep. 98 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, pp. 258 – 59. For the date cf. J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997), p. 34. 20 Ep.68 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, pp. 401–2. 17

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the silence of Christ before his persecutors, which Abelard had imitated at Sens amid the uproar of accusation,21 was replaced by the tranquillity of the cloister. This served a further purpose, subtly understated by Peter the Venerable. When he portrayed the reformed heretic as comparable, in his humility, to Saints Germain or Martin, emphasizing Abelard’s abjection, abstemiousness, and contempt for ﬁnery, he recalled one of the burning issues that divided the Cluniacs, accused of unbecoming sumptuousness, from their Cistercian critics headed by Bernard.22 Abelard, a classic instance of a monk who had professed stability and obedience in one place only to swear it again in another, demonstrated, against the opinion held at Clairvaux, the validity of Peter’s thesis that there was no harm in repeating a vow.23 Teaching by the “word and deed” of his impeccable behavior,24 the convert embodied, in the face of Cluny’s detractors, the rigorous ideals of its abbot. If Bernard had made an example of Abelard, Peter the Venerable did the same. His letter transforms the Cistercian scapegoat into a paragon of Cluniac reform. With the holiness of the heretic established in terms intelligible to both sides in the conﬂict of the orders, Peter went on to mention the absolution granted by the pope.25 Only then did he touch on the theological writings that had been the occasion, not the cause, of Abelard’s condemnation. What Peter said was charged with signiﬁcance. Pursuing the same enterprise in a different setting, the renegade teacher was now perceived as a master of orthodoxy: “His mind, tongue, and works meditated, taught, and expounded matters that were always divine, always philosophical, al21 See S. Jaeger, “Peter Abelard’s Silence at the Council of Sens,” Res publica litterarum 3 (1980), pp. 31– 54. 22 See Constable, Reformation, pp. 27–28; 170 –71. Cf. A. Bredero, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle (Amsterdam, 1958), pp. 36 – 38; 355ff. 23 Constable, Reformation, p. 19. 24 On the theme see C. Walker Bynum, “Docere verbo et exemplo”: An Aspect of Twelfth Century Spirituality, Harvard Theological Studies 31 (Missoula, 1979). 25 “Sacramenta caelestia, immortalis agni sacriﬁcium Deo offerendo, prout poterat, frequentabat, immo, postquam litteris et labore meo apostolicae gratiae redditus est, pene continuabat. Et quid multa? Mens eius, lingua eius, opus eius, semper divina, semper philosophica, semper eruditoria meditabatur, docebat, fatebatur. Tali nobiscum vir simplex et rectus, timens Deum et recedens a malo, tali, inquam, per aliquantum temporis conversatione, ultimos vitae suae dies consecrans Deo, pausandi gratia, nam plus solito scabie et quibusdam corporis incommoditatibus gravabatur, a me Cabilonem missus est. Nam propter illius soli amenitatem, qua cunctis pene Burgundiae nostrae partibus praeminet, locum ei habilem, prope urbem quidem, sed tamen Arari interﬂuente, provideram. Ibi iuxta quod incommoditas permittebat, antiqua sua renovans studia libris semper incumbebat nec, sicut de magno Gregorio legitur, momentum aliquod preterire sinebat, quin semper aut oraret, aut legeret, aut scriberet, aut dictaret. In his sacrorum operum exercitiis, eum adventus illius aevangelici visitatoris reperit, nec eum, ut multos, dormientem sed vigilantem invenit.” Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, ep. 115, p. 307.

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ways edifying.” The silent Abelard had found a legitimate alternative to speech. Once damned for doctrines propagated in and beyond the circle of his pupils, he could now be lauded for his pursuit of Christian philosophy at a dependency of Cluny. The polyvalence of Peter the Venerable’s language illustrates his thesis, playing skillfully on the monastic vocabulary of instruction and research. Eruditoria, translated above as “edifying,” connoted, in Medieval Latin, much more. An allusion to the rule of Saint Benedict—“Should a monk from outside the cloister request hospitality, be won to the life, and ask to remain,” as chapter 61 states, “he may do so, providing his conduct is good, in order to edify the others by his example”26 —it summed up the ambiguity of Peter Abelard’s position in 1140. The monk from outside Cluny admitted to the community was also a grand érudit. The generous terms of Saint Benedict’s directive, to which Peter had referred in his letter to the pope,27 contrasted with the strictness adopted, in his own statutes, to limit the hordes thronging to the monastery.28 Abelard was one of the rare exceptions accommodated in the new rule—a magna et utilis persona, capable of maintaining his vow. For Cluny he represented a permanent gain, a lasting source of ediﬁcation. The adverb semper binds eruditoria, together with divina and philosophica, into a seamless pattern of perfection. The philosophy of Abelard might not be viewed as transgressive, so long as it was developed under abbatial oversight; his learning was beyond reproach, for it was exercised in the company and for the beneﬁt of his brothers; and the theologian cast into outer darkness because he had mediated his message without restraint illuminated, by his eruditio, the select company to which he belonged. The one Peter was thus shown to have been redeemed, and the other was proved right. What was reprehensible for magister Petrus had become acceptable in Peter the monk. His magisterium (not just his fame and scholarship) could now be acknowledged, because he had become a disciple of the true teacher, whose lesson is humility.29 With elegance and precision, Peter the Venerable recast the terms in which Abelard had been attacked by his opponents, attributing a positive value to the categories of singularis scientia, 26 “Quod si non fuerit talis, qui mereatur proici, non solum, si petierit, suscipiatur congregationi sociandus, verum etiam suadeatur ut stet, ut eius exemplo alii erudiantur.” La Règle de Saint Benoît, ed. Schmitz, p. 138. 27 Statutum 35, in Consuetudines benedictinae variae, ed. Constable, pp. 69 –70. 28 Ibid., p. 69,20 and p. 70,1–2. 29 Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, ep. 115, p. 307: “Hoc magister Petrus ﬁne dies suos consummavit, et qui singulari scientiae magisterio, toti pene orbi terrarum notus, et ubique famosus erat, in illius discipulatu, qui dixit: ‘Discite a me quia mitis sum et humilis corde’; mitis et humilis perseverans, ad ipsum ut dignum est credere, sic transivit.”

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magisterium, and discipulatus that they had employed to censure him.30 And the delicacy of Peter’s style may be measured by the contrast between this “obituary” in prose which he composed for Héloïse and the explicitness of a metrical epitaph on Abelard. There that “prince” of learning— Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle rolled into one—is extolled for surpassing himself as a Cluniac monk. In the community led by his protector, Abelard had made the transition to the “true philosophy of Christ.”31 The metaphor of movement (transivit) ﬁnds a counterpoint in Peter the Venerable’s description of Abelard’s literary activity after his removal, for reasons of health, from Cluny to the priory of Saint-Marcel at Chalon-surSaône. There, bent over his books, the Christian philosopher is portrayed, without a hint of scruple about the past, as “resuming his studies of old.”32 Antiqua sua renovans studia: the present participle connotes both regeneration and renewal in the sacred sense.33 And what did Abelard write by the banks of his Burgundian retreat? The “corrections,” slight and stylistic, of the Theologia “scholarium,” which hardly altered the substance of his arguments.34 What had changed was the context of Abelard’s theology, and the submissive offender was not required to compose a different work in order to achieve a rehabilitation. The emendations that mattered were made to his conduct. Relating to the pope his mediation between Abelard and Bernard, Peter stated that he had admonished the heretic to remove anything that “might offend Catholic ears” from his speech and excise it from his books: “and so it was done.”35 Censorship, performed by the author himself on the ad30

See below, pp. 93ff. “Gallorum Socrates, Plato maximus Hesperiarum, / Noster Aristoteles; logicis quicunque fuerunt / Aut par, aut melior, studiorum cognitus orbi / Princeps. Ingenio varius, subtilis et acer, / Omnia vi superans rationis et arte loquendi; / Abaelardus erat. Sed tunc magis omnia vicit, / Cum cluniacensem monachum moremque professus, / Ad Christi veram transivit philosophiam. / In qua longeve bene complens ultima vite, / Philosophis quandoque bonis se connumerandum, / Spem dedit; undenas Maio renovante Kalendas.” C. Mews and C. Burnett, eds., “Les épitaphes d’ Abélard et d’ Héloise au Paraclet et au prieuré de Saint-Marcel, à Chalon-sur-Saône,” Studia Monastica 27 (1985), pp. 61– 67, esp. 65. 32 See above, n. 26. 33 Cf. A. Blaise, Le Vocabulaire latin des principaux thèmes liturgiques (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 376 (§ 231) and 476 –77 (§335) and G. Ladner, “Erneuerung,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 6 (1964), pp. 246 – 47. 34 See Mews in E. Buytaert and C. Mews, Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3, CCCM 13 (Turnhout, 1987), pp. 285 – 92. Cf. Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 71. 35 “Addidimus hoc monitis nostris, ut si qua catholicas aures offendentia aut scripsisset aut dixisset, hortatu eius et aliorum bonorum et sapientum et a verbis suis amoveret et a libris abraderet. Et factum est ita.” Ep. 98 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, p. 259. The last sentence appears to be ignored by Marenbon (Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 71) when he states: “In the letter where he tells of the meeting, Peter the Venerable does not say anything explicitly about Abelard’s having actually corrected any of his works at Bernard’s request.” 31

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vice of his protector, was therefore carried out on two levels, both oral and written. Describing the self-discipline exercised by Abelard over the spoken word, Peter’s letter to Heloise also served as a guarantee of his own vigilance in the sphere of writing. But the abbot of Cluny did not intend to suggest that he had stood over the model monk’s shoulder as he erased peccant doctrines from the page. Peter the Venerable meant that the brother who had taken a new vow was capable of making a fresh beginning. By his repentance, Abelard had earned the right to be sheltered from further attack and could be released to Saint-Marcel, for surveillance was unnecessary in the last serene phase of a troubled life. Deferential to the authority, moral and ecclesiastical, of his superior, the theologian could be accorded the privilege of a self-purge. Abelard had learned the lessons of tradition taught him by censorship.36 The earliest had been bitter. Theologia “Summi boni,” his ﬁrst book on the trinity, had been proscribed in 1121 at the council of Soissons. Consigned by its author to the ﬂames, the tract suffered the fate decreed for writings of which the ancient church had disapproved.37 Describing these events in the Historia calamitatum, Abelard, eager to blame his enemies, glossed over the question of his own responsibility. Yet there were precedents, neglected or ignored by this writer determined to have his way, of forestalling punitive measures against works of theology. When Saint Augustine composed two tracts against the Pelagians, he took the precaution of submitting them to Pope Boniface I for “examination and emendation.”38 That procedure, recurrently invoked, made clear the author’s obedience to higher authority and safeguarded him from the charge of arrogating to himself the magisterium reserved for the teaching ofﬁce of the hierarchy. Distinct from the informal practice of requesting the criticism of friends and colleagues,39 censura praevia never lost its signiﬁcance in cases 36 Still useful are the (incomplete) surveys of J. Hilgers, Die Bücherverbote in Papstbriefen (Freiburg, 1907), pp. 3 –15 and id., Der Index der verbotenen Bücher (Freiburg, 1904). Cf. too J. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher, 3 vols. (Bonn, 1883 – 85) and D. H. West, The Precensorship of Books. Canons 1384–1386, 1392–1394, 2318 §2. A History and a Commentary, Catholic University of America. Canon Law Studies 329 (Washington, D.C., 1953). On the twelfth century, see G. Flahiff, “Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books in the Twelfth Century,” MS 4 (1942), pp. 1–22. 37 See W. Speyer, Büchervernichtung und Zensur des Geistes bei Heiden, Juden, und Christen, Bibliothek des Buchwesens 7 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 174 –75. 38 “Haec . . . ad tuam potissimum dirigere sanctitatem non tam discenda quam examinanda et, ubi forsitan aliquid displicuerit, emendanda constitui.” Augustine, Contra duas epistolas Pelaganiorum libri quattuor I, 3, in Oeuvres de saint Augustin 23, ed. F.-J. Thonnard (Paris, 1974), p. 316. Cf. Gennadius, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, ed. G. Herding (Leipzig, 1926), p. 112. 39 Cf. Ambrose, Ep. 33, 1, in S. Ambrosii opera et epistulae et acta 1, Epistularum libri iiv, ed. O. Faller (Vienna, 1968), p. 226. This distinction is often confused in the secondary literature, e.g., Flahiff, “Ecclesiastical Censorship,” pp. 14ff.

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of heresy during the early Middle Ages. In 867, for example, Pope Nicholas I, writing to Charles the Bald about Eriugena’s translation of pseudoDionysius, declared that it was customary and proper for such a work, by a learned but suspect author, to be sent to the holy father and submitted to his judgment. Since this had not been done, the omission should be made good in short order, “so that the book might enjoy the universal favor that derives from approval by papal authority.”40 Authority rather than doctrine was the nub of the matter. In the conﬂict of the orders striving for ecclesiastical primacy,41 a monk like Abelard, who not only presumed to teach but also expounded his lesson to a mixed “public,” was perceived to have violated the spirit of strictness in which the rule was now being interpreted42 and to have obscured a fundamental distinction between the laity and clergy. Likened to the “two walls” and “two sides” of the church in a work on the sacraments written by Hugh of SaintVictor between 1136 and 1141, not only their parallel within unity was evoked but also their separation.43 Bernard of Clairvaux was by no means the ﬁrst to condemn this confusion of categories effected by an Abelard following his head.44 Conﬁned, in 1121, to the penal establishment of 40 “Quod iuxta morem nobis mitti et nostro debuit iudicio approbari; praesertim cum idem Ioannes, licet multae scientiae esse predicetur, olim non sane sapere in quibusdam frequenti rumore diceretur. Itaque quod hactenus omissum est, vestra industria suppleat et nobis praefatum opus sine ulla cunctatione mittat, quatenus, dum a nostri apostolatus iudicio fuerit approbatum, ab omnibus incunctanter nostra auctoritate acceptum habeatur.” MGH Epistolae 6, Epistolae Karolini Aevi 4, ed. E. Perels (reprint Munich, 1978), p. 130. For the view that the letter is an eleventh-century forgery, see M. Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène: Sa Vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (Louvain, 1933), p. 155. 41 Cf. J. van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150,” Speculum 61 (1986), pp. 265 – 304, esp. 282ff. and G. Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. The Interpretation of Mary and Martha. The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ. The Orders of Society (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 294ff. 42 Cf. A.Vauchez, “L’Église et la culture: Mutations et tensions,” in Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours, 5: Apogée de la papauté et expansion de la chrétienté (1054 – 1274), ed. A.Vauchez (Paris, 1993), p. 434. 43 PL 176, 416 –17 with Y. Congar, “Les Laïcs et l’ecclésiologie des ordines chez les théologiens des xie et xiie siècles,” in id., Etudes, pp. 83 –117; L. Prosdocimi, “Chierici e laici nella società occidentale nel secolo xii. A proposito di Decr. Grat. C. 12. q. l. c. 7:’Duo sunt genera Christianorum’,” in Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series C, Subsidia 1 (Vatican City, 1965), pp. 105 – 22, esp. 117ff. and W.H. Principe, CSB, “The School Theologians’ View of the Papacy, 1150–1250,” in The Religious Roles of the Papacy: Ideals and Realities 1050–1300, ed. W. Ryan (Toronto, 1980), pp. 49ff. Cf. J. Verger, “Abélard. Des écoles au cloître,” in Moines et religieux au Moyen Age, ed. J. Berlioz (Paris, 1994), pp. 57–75, esp. 65. 44 Cf. J. Châtillon, “Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, le monachisme et les écoles: À Propos de Rupert de Deutz et de Guillaume de Conches,” in id., D’ Isidore de Séville à saint Thomas d’Aquin (London, 1985), pp. 375– 94. See further below, p. 25.

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Saint-Médard on the ruling of a council presided over by a papal legate, he was branded a recidivist by William of Saint-Thierry when he resumed teaching at Paris more than a decade later.45 It followed that, because Abelard’s offense was primarily ecclesiological, it could be removed by acknowledgment of his faults and by the practice of obedience. Of this, the author of the rule for the Paraclete was aware before 1140. From Soissons to Sens and Rome: the ofﬁcial route of Abelard’s two condemnations had been accompanied by an inner development. When he undertook the self-censorship advised by Peter the Venerable, it was consistent with his earlier professions of willingness to correct the sequels of Theologia “Summi boni.” 46 After 1121 Abelard, divided between the “victim’s” defensiveness and the aspiration to exercise a form of intellectual leadership, attached to the alleged manifesto of free inquiry which forms the prologue to his Sic et non a canon de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis from the pseudo-Gelasian decretals.47 Equally inclined to dominate and to conciliate, Abelard paid more attention to the limits of orthodoxy than his romantic image suggests; and when the author of the Metamorphosis Golye episcopi lamented that “the cowled primate of the cowled people” had “imposed silence on so great a sage,”48 he displayed less insight than indignation. Neither Bernard of Clairvaux nor Innocent II was the silencer of Abelard. He was Peter the Venerable, whose efforts to restore the converted scholasticus to ecclesiastical respectability culminated in an absolution obtained from the pope. Hung on Abelard’s tomb by a Héloïse who knew that it had been obtained at a price,49 the document testiﬁed to his acceptance of a strict interpretation of the monk’s duties that he once had appeared to ﬂaunt. Renouncing his claims to a suspect, because personal, primacy, the proud magister deferred in death to that of the church. And, as consolation, his widow and sister in God had acquired a new lover. Most urbane of courtiers in the age of amour courtois, Peter the Venerable began his account of Abelard’s last months with a recollection of past and enduring passion for Héloïse. Even before she had taken orders, he 45

See J. Miethke, “Abelards Stellung zur Kirchenreform,” pp. 163ff. and below, pp. 90ff. See below, p. 76. 47 On the transmission of the pseudo-Gelasian Decretum, see E. von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 194ff; on its character, cf. W. Ullmann, Gelasius I (492– 496). Das Papsttum an der Wende der Spätantike zum Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 256– 59; on its inﬂuence, J. de Ghellinck, Le Mouvement théologique au xiie siècle (Bruges, 1948), pp. 474 –77. 48 “Clamant a philosopho plures educati: / cucullatus populi Primas cucullati / et ut cepe tunicis tribus tunicati, / imponi silencium fecit tanto vati.” R. B. Huygens, ed., “Mitteilungen aus Handschriften 2,” SM 3,2 ser. 3 (1962), pp. 764 –72 with J. F. Benton, “Philology’s Search for Abelard,” Speculum 50 (1975), pp. 199 –217. 49 Ep. 167 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, p. 401. 46

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her.50

had admired Recalling (or imagining) himself, during his youth, in the situation described by the Historia calamitatum,51 the abbot of Cluny offered himself as a substitute for the partner whom Heloise had lost. Spiritual replacing carnal attraction, he then praised the learning of the abbess in terms that echoed those of her former husband.52 Rare among women for her erudition, she was Abelard’s equal as a proponent of “true philosophy.”53 Worthy of the magisterium he had attributed to her,54 Héloïse would have been (had circumstances allowed) as much of an asset to Cluny as the model monk protected by Peter. Temporarily divided by death, but future lovers in heaven, the couple was thus placed in a parallel that, without ignoring the erotic bond that had united them,55 altered its sense. Subordinating the personal histories of Abelard and Heloise to the goals of the reforming church, Peter the Venerable suggested how the abbess of the Paraclete might ﬁnd comfort in her grief through the example set by the monk of Cluny. His wisdom, at the end of his life, was not acquired by “inquisitively disputing about created things in the philosophical manner” but by “devoutly and earnestly seeking knowledge of the creator.”56 In the ample embrace of Ecclesia, there was room for intellectuals. They earned it by knowing their place. Cautious not to trespass into territory that the hierarchy had declared beyond bounds, they were free to enjoy that measure of liberty deﬁned by their acceptance of auctoritas. Between the lines of Peter the Venerable’s “private” consolation, its meaning was plain to his monastic audience. The public message did not need to be spelled out. Enough had been said by Abelard’s eloquent silence. One of Peter’s indirect addressees had reason to understand what was conveyed, explicitly and obliquely, by his letter. Bernard of Clairvaux, in 1125, had written to the canon-regular, Ogier of Mont-Saint-Éloy, on the subject of silence. This ambivalent work, by a self-styled ignoramus who at times professed disdain for the verbal arts and the pursuit of learning,57 re50 “Reuera enim non nunc primum diligere incipio quam ex multo tempore me dilexisse reminiscor. Necdum plene metas adolescentiae excesseram, necdum in iuueniles annos euaseram, quando nomen non quidem adhuc religionis tuae, sed honestorum tamen et laudabilium studiorum tuorum michi fama innotuit.” Ep. 115 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, p. 303. 51 J. Monfrin, ed., Historia calamitatum, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1967), pp. 71, 280ff. 52 Ibid., pp. 286ff. and cf. Ep. 9 in Peter Abelard. Letters IX–XIV. An Edition with an Introduction, ed. E. Smits (Groningen, 1983), pp. 233, 360ff. 53 Ep. 115 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, p. 304. 54 Ibid., p. 305 and Ep. 9 in Peter Abelard. Letters IX–XIV, pp. 233, 360. 55 Cf. P. Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow, 1976), p. 23. 56 Ep. 94 in Letters of Peter the Venerable 1, p. 250. 57 See below, pp. 104ff. and pp. 144ff.

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veals much about the problem of monastic magisterium solved for Abelard by Peter the Venerable: You will perhaps be outraged or, to put it more mildly, surprised that you receive such a short note instead of the lengthier letter which you hoped I would send you. But remember, as the wise man said: “Everything under the sun has its time, and that there is both a time for speaking and a time for silence.” Yet when is silence to have its time, if even the holy days of Lent are taken up by our prattling together? It is as time-consuming as it is demanding, since we are not even able, without effort and in person, to say to one another what we want but are forced, separately, to write down what we wish from the other or what is wished of us. When I am absent from you and think, repeat, scribble, and send what you at present read, I ask: “Where is the leisure, where the repose of silence?” “But all of this,” you will say, “you can do in silence.” It would be extraordinary, were this your considered reply. Is there not an immense uproar in the mind of those who write, through the din caused by a myriad of expressions, the clash between stylistic variety and differences of meaning, the frequent rejections of ideas that occur and the repeated search for those that escape? There the most avid attention is paid to what seems more beautiful according to literary criteria, more consistent in terms of the sense, more straightforward in the interests of understanding, more useful for mutual awareness—what, in short, comes before or after what. All these things and many more are observed with critical vigilance by those learned in this type of activity. And you say that I am at rest when I am writing? Do you call this silence, even if the tongue is speechless? Yet not only is this not the time to make the effort that you demand, but it is also contrary to my monastic vow and beyond my capacity to carry out what you wish. For it is the duty of the monk who I appear to be, and of the sinner who I am, not to teach but to mourn. Moreover, if an ignoramus like me, on his own truthful admission, presumes to teach what he does not know, he commits an act of unsurpassable ignorance. To teach is thus something beyond the grasp of an ignoramus, outside the initiative of a monk, and alien to the desires of a repentant sinner. For this very reason “I hastened to escape and remain in solitude” and, with the prophet, I have determined to “heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue” for, in the words of the same prophet, “an evil speaker shall not be established on the earth” and, according to another passage of scripture, “death and life are in the power of the tongue.” However, as Isaiah says, “silence is the effect of righteousness” etc. and, as Jeremiah teaches, “it is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.” But in order not to seem wholly to refuse what you have requested, I invite and challenge both you and those like you—who-

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ever they may be—wishing to advance to a more virtuous state, to seek this righteousness—this mother, nurse, and guardian of all virtues—if not by my words of learning, then certainly by the example of my silence, intending at least through my muteness to instruct you on how to avoid speech, since your words compel me to teach what I do not know. But what am I doing? It would be a wonder if you did not laugh for I, who seem to condemn wordiness so severely, am carried away on a torrent of verbiage and, while desiring to commend silence to you, militate against it with my long-windedness. You wish to take comfort from the life of repentance which our friend Guerric leads and to learn how we judge its fruits: know that his manner of life is worthy of God and that he has proﬁted ﬁttingly from repentance. I do not have in my possession the book that you want from me. A friend of ours has kept it with the same eagerness with which you demand it. But in order not to respond to your kindly request with a blank refusal, I send you another book which I have recently brought out, In Praise of the Virgin Mary, and ask you to return it to me as soon as possible (for I do not have a copy) or, should you come earlier, to bring it with you.58 58 “Indignaris forsitan vel (ut temperantius dicam) miraris quod pro longiori epistola, quam a nobis speraveras, tam brevem chartulam receperis. Sed memento, iuxta virum sapientem, ‘omnia sub caelo tempus habere, et tempus quidem loquendi et tempus esse tacendi.’ Quando autem suum tempus silentium habebit, si hos etiam sacros dies Quadragesimae nostra sibi vindicat confabulatio? Eaque ipsa tanto occupatior, quanto laboriosior, dum non quidem praesentes alterutrum leviter dicere valemus, quae volumus, sed absentibus necesse est nobis invicem diligenter dictare quae vel petimus ab invicem vel petimur. Dum vero absens cogito, dictito, scriptito, mittoque quod praesens legas, rogo: ‘ubi otium, ubi silentii quies?’ ‘Sed haec,’ inquies, ‘omnia facere potes in silentio.’ Mirum si ex sententia hoc respondeas. Quantus enim tumultus est in mente dictantium, ubi multitudo perstrepit dictionum, orationum varietas et diversitas sensuum concurrit; ubi saepe respuitur, quod occurrit, et requiritur, quod excidit? Ubi quid pulchrius secundum litteram, quid consequentius iuxta sententiam, quid planius propter intelligentiam, quid utilius ad conscientiam, quid denique cui vel post vel ante ponatur intentissime attenditur, multaque alia, quae a doctis in huiusmodi curiosius observantur? Et tu in hoc dices mihi esse quietem? Tu hoc, etiamsi lingua sileat, silentium nominabis? “Quamquam non solum temporis, sed nec meae professionis est, huic rei operam dare quam postulas, nec possibilitatis adimplere quod optas, siquidem vel monachi, quod esse videor, vel peccatoris, quod sum, ofﬁcium non est docere, sed lugere. Indoctus quoque—quod et vere me fateor esse—si praesumat docere quod nescit, nihil indoctius agit. Docere itaque nec indocto est in promptu, nec monacho in ausu, nec paenitenti in affectu. Sed et propter hoc ‘elongavi fugiens et maneo in solitudine,’ et cum propheta proposui ‘custodire vias meas, ut non delinquam in lingua mea,’ quoniam iuxta eundem prophetam: ‘Vir linguosus non dirigetur super terram,’ et secundum aliam scripturam: ‘Mors et vita in manibus linguae.’ “Silentium” autem, dicente Isaia, ‘cultus est iustitiae,’ et: ‘Bonum est,’ ut docet Ieremias, ‘exspectare salutare Dei cum silentio.’ Ad hunc ergo iustitiae cultum—hanc omnium virtutum matrem, nutricem, custodem—ne penitus videar negare quod petiisti, et te et quicumque, tui similes, proﬁcere cupiunt in virtutibus invito et provoco, etsi non verbo doctrinae, certe mei silentii exemplo, ut vel silendo doceam te silere, qui loquendo me compellis docere quod nescio.

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Arch and ironical, Bernard of Clairvaux represents silence both as a duty of the obedient monk and as a metaphor for authority. What, then, was the auctoritas of a monastic writer, like himself, departing from the rule? Where was his letter, intimate yet ofﬁcial, to be placed between the private and public spheres of an ecclesiastical culture that depended, for its network of contacts and system of friendships or rivalries, on epistolary communication?59 And communication itself, prohibited at speciﬁed times and places, raised questions about the role of the scrupulous author. Who was he, bound by his vow to a life of repentance, to raise his voice in dictation or put pen to paper?60 How was the otium, the leisured tranquillity of the contemplative life,61 to be found amid the hustle and bustle of literary pursuits? In this tour de force of compression that styles itself prolix, Bernard both meditates on the writer’s status and enters into a dialogue with posterity. Ogier was the recipient of his letter but not the only member of its readership. Bernard wrote for a wider audience. Assiduous collector of his own correspondence, he intended it to be exemplary. Fact mingles with ﬁction, history with literature in many of his formal epistles,62 and he seldom misses the opportunity to invest a date, an event, or an occasion with a wider signiﬁcance. Here it is provided by Lent, season of repentance, confession, and obedience to the law. Speech appearing a sin more heinous than usual in the hallowed days reserved for contemplation of Christ’s pas“Sed quid ego facio? Mirum si non rides, quod ego, qui multiloquium tantopere damnare videor, in tam multa verba tam loquaciter iam progredior et, dum cupio tibi commendare silentium, contra silentium per multiloquium pugno. Guerricum nostrum, de cuius conversatione et paenitentia consolari desideras, quantum ex fructibus eius perpendimus, noveris digne Deo conversari dignosque paenitentiae facere fructus. Libellum autem, quem a me exigis, penes me modo non habeo. Quidam enim amicus noster eodem zelo, quo tu ﬂagitas, diu est quod apud se illum detinet. Sed ne tuae pietatis petitionem abire patiar omnino frustratam, alium nuper a me editum In laudibus Virginis Matris tibi transmitto, quem, quia eius exemplar non teneo, rogo ut quantocius ad me remittas vel, si maturius adveneris, ipse deferas tecum.” Sancti Bernardi Opera 7, ed. H. Rochais and J. Leclercq (Rome, 1974), pp. 235–37. 59 See J. Haseldine, “Friendship and Rivalry: The Role of Amicitia in Twelfth-Century Monastic Relations,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), pp. 340 – 414 and G. Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen age occidental 17 (Turnhout, 1976). 60 On the senses of dictare in Bernard’s prose, see P. Rassow, “Die Kanzlei St. Bernards von Clairvaux,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 34 (1913), pp. 67–69 and Leclercq, “Saint Bernard et ses secrétaires,” in Recueil 1, pp. 3–25. 61 See Leclercq, Otia monastica. Etudes sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au Moyen Age, Studia Anselmiana 51 (Rome, 1963). For the link between otium and silentium, cf. G. Knight, “The Language of Retreat and the Eremetic Ideal in Some Letters of Peter the Venerable,” AHDLM 63 (1996), pp. 7– 43, esp. 8–11. 62 Cf. Leclercq, “Lettres de Saint Bernard: Histoire ou littérature?” Recueil 4, pp. 125 – 226.

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sion, a hint of profanity surrounds the noun confabulatio—the frivolity of gossip in contrast to sacred silence. Yet the pejorative overtones are alleviated by the practical consideration that absent friends must resort to written communication, which Bernard proceeds to transform into a version of disputatio. To the imagined objection that one can write without speaking, his reply is metaphysical. Should a dialogue with Ogier be preferred to a meditation on God? The effort to overcome distance from the one increased separation from the other. Space, in this sense, was less an external than an inner measurement; and silence was not the absence of speech but an act of spiritual concentration.63 Attentive to the divine message and untroubled by activity, intellectual or physical, the monk should retreat to the otium and quies of the cell.64 Hence a dialectic of movement that culminates in paradox. Reaching out to his audience, Bernard of Clairvaux declares his desire for withdrawal. At one with Abelard in his interpretation of the metaphor of silence, this alleged enemy of the artes was a virtuoso in applying them to literature. Bernard writes, here and elsewhere, as a monkish mannerist. In images that evoke the din and disturbance caused by a crowd, he conveys the author’s search for just expressions and becoming style. Composition and distraction are ﬁrst identiﬁed, then exempliﬁed in his vivid prose. Illustrating the principle of orationis varietas, he rings the changes on prepositions (secundum, iuxta, propter, ad), while displaying, with a feigned air of confusion, his tasteful assortment of adverbs and pronouns (quid, denique, cui, vel post, vel ante ponatur). Before and after, above and below: these pyrotechnices of pedantry are not an end to themselves. Demanding and defying the attention to which their author alludes, they reﬂect, on a different and deeper level, the verbosity of the writer’s “silence.” Silentium, as Ogier deﬁnes it, does not exist. It follows, in the humorous logic of Bernard’s paradox, that to decline entails acceptance. Profounder than a classical recusatio, in which the author’s unwillingness to write is belied by its expression, Bernard’s underlying theme is the inadequacy of language. Trapped in the dilemma of a medium insufﬁcient for his purposes and of a task he is loath to shirk, the ambivalent author seeks refuge in the solution of alternative voices. It is not he who speaks as a doc63 Cf. S. Raueisser, Schweigemuster. Eine Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Odo Casel, Gustav Mensching, Rudolf Otto, Karl Rahner, Wilhelm Weischedel und Bernhard Wate (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 124 –29, and U. Ruberg, Beredtes Schweigen in lehrhafter und erzählender Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters, Münstersche MittelalterStudien 32 (Munich, 1978), pp. 19ff. 64 On the theme cf. G. Hocquard, “Solitudo cellae,” in C. :eirin and L. Halpten, eds., Mélanges d’histoire du Moyen Age dédiées à la mémoire de L. Halphen (Paris, 1951), pp. 323– 31.

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tor but Saint Jerome, prohibiting monks to teach and enjoining them to lament, or the prophets of doom announcing the end of this world to an abbot of Clairvaux keen to proclaim his readiness for the next. Thinly concealed behind the penitent’s pose lurks that sense of righteousness which made Bernard a bane to many of his contemporaries. Attributing to his authorities the status he declines for himself, this ignorant sinner can maintain an illusion of speechlessness, by teaching with quotations. What he neither knows nor says is voiced in the wisdom of others. The limits of expressibility are reached by the end of the second paragraph, where self-effacement is difﬁcult to distinguish from self-advertisement. Aware that he borders on absurdity, the praiser of silence resolves the tension by laughter, and the practitioner of wordiness achieves a pyrrhic victory over his conscience. Back to business is the leitmotif, as scruples are jettisoned. The novice Guerric was making progress and, although Bernard did not have on hand the book Ogier requested, he would send him another about the Virgin Mary. Having demurred at being regarded as a teacher, he then asserts his authorial rights—barking out a command to return, without delay, the only copy of his work. Didactic and domineering, yet sensitive to the anomalies of his position, Bernard sustained a precarious balance between the humility that the rule normally demanded of a monk and the authority that he claimed exceptionally. Exceptions, of course, proved the rule. In order to maintain silence, the conversi or lay brothers could be dispensed from strict silentium.65 In the fullness of his vocation and the multitude of his occupations, the abbot of Clairvaux was not to be confused with them. His analogy was to Saint Jerome, that exemplar of virtue thwarted by the demands of his correspondents and the duty of replying to them.66 The outside world intruded, not only in the person of Ogier but also in the form of sophisticated readers. The men of learning whom the indoctus Bernardus of the second paragraph imagines judging his efforts would survey his letter curiosius. Curiositas, in the negative sense deﬁned by Bernard’s cultural invective, was a sin.67 The beauty of style, to which he alludes so ambiguously here, recalls his polemic, in the Apologia, against the empty estheticism displayed 65 Amusingly P. Fuchs in id. and N. Luhmann, Reden und Schweigen (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), p. 38: “Die Konversen werden weitgehend vom Schweigen entbunden, weil schweigend das Schweigen nicht organisiert werden kann.” On conversi, see Constable, Reformation, pp. 77ff. 66 P. Antin, “Solitude et silence chez St. Jérome,” Revue d’ ascétique et de mystique 40 (1964), pp. 265–76, esp. 270 –71. 67 See G. Bös, “Curiositas.” Die Rezeption eines antiken Begriffes durch christliche Autoren bis Thomas von Aquin, Veröffentlichungen des Grabmann-Instituts 39 (Paderborn, 1995), pp. 150ff. and J. Lerclercq, “Curiositas et le retour à Dieu chez s. Bernard,” in Receuil 5, pp. 319–30.

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in the curiosae depictiones of Cluny.68 Shackles to the material and (therefore) inferior world, ﬁne art, elegant tapestries, and splendid architecture distracted from the quies of the contemplative life.69 Self-expression implied self-will, restricting the true freedom to be found in acceptance of divine law.70 Writing with all the reﬁnement of the litterati, Bernard of Clairvaux emphasized that he commanded their skills without accepting their criteria. Non litteratus “sed spiritualis omnia diiudicat” (1 Corinthians 2:15), enjoined Hugh of Saint-Victor in the Didascalicon.71 To his fellow spiritualis Bernard, that injunction was pertinent at a time when the terms litteratus and clericus were becoming synonymous.72 The laity, however sophisticated their learning, should not presume to judge the unlettered compositions of a monk. His literary world was, or should be, separate— even if, with a show of difﬁdence, it could be proved equal to theirs. Hence the mixture of playful coquetterie and genuine ill-ease in Bernard’s letter. Less measured but more animated than Peter the Venerable’s, it expresses similar tensions between control and openness within ecclesiastical culture during the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century. From a refusal to write to quotation, from instruction to admonition and command: the movement of thought enacted in Bernard’s self-conscious prose is one of successive attraction and repulsion. Tempted by the seductions of literature yet wary of the profane critics equipped to assess its merits; determined to maintain speechlessness while championing it with verbosity, the ambivalent advocate of monastic rigor abandons lamentation for laughter and reverts to his unofﬁcial role as a teacher. In the negative theology of silence, magisterium belonged to him who denied it to Abelard. Bernard of Clairvaux was counted, by Peter of Celle in the third quarter of the twelfth century, among the “modern masters” of the age. Placing him without irony in the company of Gilbert of Poitiers, whose orthodoxy 68 Cf. R. Newhauser, “The Sin of Curiosity and the Cistercians,” Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 11 (1987), pp. 71– 95, esp. 81. 69 On the terms see Leclercq, Otia monastica, pp. 104ff. 70 For context cf. Constable, “Liberty and Free Choice in Monastic Thought and Life, especially in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in La Notion de liberté au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident, Penn-Paris Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia 4 (Paris, 1985), pp. 99 –118, esp. 104. 71 Didascalion 6,4, ed. T. Offergeld, in Hugo von Sankt Viktor. Didascalicon. De studio legendi—Studienbuch, Fontes Christiani 27 (Freiburg, 1997), p. 382. See below, pp. 165ff. and cf. H. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les Quatre Sens de l’ Ecriture, 1, 2 (Paris, 1961), pp. 292ff. 72 See P. Classen, “Die hohen Schulen und die Gesellschaft im 12. Jahrhundert,” in id., Studium und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, ed. J. Fried (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 1–26, esp. 17–18 and G. Constable, “The Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century,” Viator 25 (1994), pp. 14, 131–52.

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impugned,73

Bernard had Peter referred to two types of teaching authority that had more in common with one another than is suggested by the traditional opposition between “the schools” and “the cloister.” That antithesis obscures the extent to which even the alleged scourge of the magistri adapted himself to their approach and appropriated their methods.74 Receptive to the example of the Abelard whom he challenged, Bernard himself was not invulnerable to the charges he leveled against his opponent.75 Both of them were locked in a contest for leadership which culminated, amid the crisis of schism and the conﬂict of the religious orders, during and after the 1120s.76 A weakened papacy, often in exile from the holy city, sought to afﬁrm the primacy of Peter by allying itself with the reformers, among whom the Cistercians were prominent.77 Bernard behaved as if he had the pope in his pocket. That strategy, generally successful with Innocent II, was less effective during the pontiﬁcate of the Cistercian Eugenius III (1145- 53), when the sacred college asserted its rights.78 Confronted with the mounting inﬂuence of the cardinals and challenged by the interventions of the emperor, the successors of Saint Peter, for much of the twelfth century, were rarely in a position to exercise or enforce the magisterium of their ofﬁce. Theology went its own way, system clashing with system;79 and if Gratian assigned priority, in matters of doctrinal dispute (in causis deﬁniendis), to the pope’s auctoritas over the claims of scholarship,80 the “masters in the schools,” with what Bernard regarded as their dangerous proximity to secular culture, were fast acquiring their own authority.81 Not everyone perceived that as a threat. The Premonstratensian Philip of Harvengt, prior of Bonne-Espérance, had occasion to lament Bernard’s behavior, which led to his exile after a quarrel about a brother who had de73 Chenu, La Théologie au douzième siècle, Etudes de philosophie médiévale 45 (Paris, 1957), p. 326. On Bernard’s clash with Gilbert, see below pp. 123ff. 74 See below, pp. 93ff. 75 See below p. 148. 76 For a clear general account, see C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy. The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 182–262. 77 See F.-J. Schmale, Studien zum Schisma des Jahres 1130 (Cologne, 1961), pp. 260ff. 78 See below, pp. 00ff. 79 Cf. A. Landgraf, “Der heilige Bernard in seinem Verhältnis zur Theologie des zwölften Jahrhunderts,” in Bernard von Clairvaux, Mönch und Mystiker (Wiesbaden, 1955), pp. 44– 62, esp. 50 and id., Dogmengeschichte der Frühscholastik 1, 1 (Regensburg, 1952), pp. 13ff. 80 See H. Schlüsser, Der Primat der Heiligen Schrift als theologisches und kanonistisches Problem im Spätmittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1977) pp. 18ff.; B. Tierney, “Ockham, the Conciliar Theory, and the Canonists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), pp. 40 –70, esp. 48ff.; id., Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 37ff.; and L. Buisson, Potestas und Caritas (Cologne, 1958), pp. 51ff. 81 Chenu, Théologie, pp. 323 – 65.

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Cistercians.82

fected to the “As religion expands,” observed Philip with the symmetry of sarcasm, “brotherly love retracts.”83 Distinguishing between “your church and ours”84 —between those wearing the habit of fraternal peace and those bent on stirring up trouble85 —this regular canon asked pointedly: “Does God belong to monks alone?”86 Although not unsympathetic to Cistercian reform, Philip refused to accept what seemed, to him and others, the overweening claims made by the order; and when he wrote to its enemy, Reinard of Dassel, arch-chancellor of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to congratulate him on his election as archbishop of Cologne, it was in an attempt to reclaim the “arch-schismatic” for a less exclusive church.87 Ecumenical in his tastes, Philip of Harvengt had no time for a strain of reforming rhetoric that condemned the study of the liberal arts. Knowledge of letters was essential to men of religion, he argued; “sanctity without scientia often errs, and vice versa.” For Philip the school and the cloister were not opposites but complements; and a literary education was of beneﬁt to all.88 “All” included laity, such as the son of Henry, count of Champagne who, although destined for a military career, was capable of outdoing not only his secular peers by his “mastery of the art of letters” but also many clerics “in his erudition.” In that mirror of princes provided by the writings of both Christians and pagans, a boy with a book might perceive his glowing reﬂection.89 Reﬂected in Philip’s imagery is a wish to ﬁnd a middle way between the austerity of the ascetics and the lure of profane learning. Reform need not entail repudiation of ars and scientia, notably advanced in his own times; and even when he wrote about the silence of clerics, this mediator between the secular and the spiritual worlds was concerned rather to direct than to devalue speech. Speech, as Philip conceived it, should be limpid, disciplined, and reasonable. If reason is enhanced by doctrina, the faith is ornamented by the intellect in the “workshop” of the mind where the two are

82 On this dispute see P. Delhaye, “Saint Bernard de Clairvaux et Philippe de Harveng,” Bulletin de la société historique et archéologique de Langres 12 (1953), pp. 129 – 38. On Philip in his context, see G. Schreiber, “Praemonstratensenkultur des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Analecta Praemonstratensia 16 (1940), pp. 41–107 and ibid., 17 (1941), pp. 5 – 33. 83 “Movet me, quod nostris temporibus et religionem video dilatari et dilectionem fraternam plurimum coactari” Ep. 11, PL 203, 87. 84 Ep. 10, PL 203, 78 85 Ibid., PL 203, 81 86 Ibid., PL 203, 82 87 Ep. 19, PL 203, 160 – 65. On Reinald see below, chapter 6. 88 Ep. 18, PL 203, 158 – 59. 89 “assumpto codice gaudes lectionis serie revoluta, in qua tanquam in speculo tua tibi lucet facies absoluta” Ep. 17, PL 203, 153.

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together.90

“honed” An integrated culture was the aim, a natural harmony that stands in contrast to the strained paradoxes of indoctus Bernardus. That unity is exempliﬁed in Philip of Harvengt’s De silentio clericorum, the longest treatise on the subject produced in the twelfth century. His own prolixity did not inhibit its author from criticizing the verbosity of others, for what he, like Bernard and Abelard, understood by silence was less the absence of speech than the exercise of control.91 And if vaga licentia loquendi, for Philip, was a breach of the rules of inward restraint derived from the Bible,92 in the course of his ruminatio on holy writ,93 pagan writers are quoted as authorities on the subject of clerical learning. When Juvenal, in the opening line of his ﬁrst satire, asked: “Shall I always be a mere listener? Am I never to reply?” these questions amounted to an attack on other poets’ wordiness, ignorance, lack of sophistication and style. Usurping the “place of teachers” (doctorum locus), they inﬂicted their useless rantings on a public whom Juvenal sought to defend.94 The parallel is patent, its relevance contemporary. Imparting a lesson on the necessity of guarded speech, the satirist of the second century was enlisted as 90 “Doctus quidem sermo est fundatus solida ratione, doctior est ratio, cuius doctrinae decus elucet in sermone. Artes vero digno laudis culmine tunc beantur, cum istorum communi praesentia consecrantur. Nulla enim ars, nulla congrue pertractatur scientiae disciplina, quae nequaquam in illorum communi limatur ofﬁcina, ad quam pertractandam vel sermoni rationis acumen non succurrit, vel rationi praeviae sermo congruus non occurrit.” De silentio clericorum 21, PL 203, 980. 91 Ibid., 1, PL 203, 945 92 Cf. ibid. 93 For the term cf. J. Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Age, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1956), pp. 72ff. Cf. J. Hamesse, “Il modello della lettura nell ‘età della scolastica,” in Storia della lettura nel mondo occidentale, ed. C. Cavallo and R. Chartier (Rome, 1995), pp. 91–115, esp. 92ff. 94 “Denique gentiles, qui licet inﬁdelis ignorantiae tenebris obcaecati curam tamen impendunt paulo diligentius honestati, non aestimant rectum esse, ut pravorum semper garrulitas audiatur, et patientia degeneri nunquam responsione congrua feriatur. Quorum unus:

‘Semper ego,’ inquit, ‘auditor tantum? nunquamne reponam?’ Audiebat iste satiricus rusticanam multitudinem poetarum, qui cum perexiguam obtinerent scientiam litterarum, mira tamen impudentia doctorum sibi locum et vocabulum assumebant et rauca et inutili verbositate libros et poemata contexebant. Quod cum huic multo tempore displiceret, nec tamen illis redargutione congrua responderet, tandem ei visum est, quod non esset diutius cum silentio sufferendum, sed gravedini tam molestae aliquid molestiae reponendum. ‘Cum certum,’ inquit, ‘habeam vos poetas ignobiles nihil vel parum scire, parvam curam litteris, nullum profectioni studium impertire, semperne audiam rauca impudentia vos garrire, rusticana poemata inconsideratius effutire et huic tantae procaciae, qua me vexare praesumitis, nihil reponam, tantaeque phrenesi necessarium purgationis helleborum non apponam?’ Sic etiam cum nequam homines processu temporis ad poenitentiam non mollescunt, sed quo magis sufferuntur, eo ad peccandum gravius indurescunt, summus ille castigator ad feriendum plerumque praeparatur, ne, si parcere plus decernat, obstinatius delinquatur.” De silentio clericorum 56, PL 203, 1053.

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an ally of Philip of Harvengt in the twelfth. For him, it was of little moment that one partner in this alliance had been an antique pagan. The other, with the aid of Ethica,95 could bring him up to date. Moralism transforming Juvenal into an spokesman of the Christian cause,96 auctoritates from the classics reinforced Philip’s authority. Deﬁned by the limits of a scriptural context, his licentia loquendi was tempered by a caution that his senior, Rupert of Deutz,97 acquired at a cost. Rupert was an upstart. Or so he was regarded by those who described him as a novus homo seeking to “graft himself onto the ancient nobility” by writing, after Saint Augustine, a commentary on the Gospel of John.98 In 1115–16, amid accusations of heresy, Rupert spoke out for his work in an appeal to his abbot and patron, Cuno I of Siegburg.99 He would attest the sincerity of Rupert’s faith to the scholastici ecclesiasticae scientiae et ﬁdei,100 among whom this monk without a training in dialectic declined to count himself.101 Although his orthodoxy had been questioned and his views tested at a “trial,” Rupert would have disclaimed any resemblance to Abelard,102 soon to be prosecuted at Soissons. Had not Christ and the apostles refrained from announcing the gospel “publicly”? Had they not forbidden revelation to be discussed on the “highways and byways”?103 95 See best P. Delhaye, “Grammatica et Ethica au douzième siècle,” in id., Enseignement et morale au xiie siècle (Paris, 1988), pp. 83 –134. Cf. R. Kohn, “Schulbildung und Trivium in lateinischen Mittelalter und ihr möglich-praktisches Nutzen,” in Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. J. Fried (Sigmarigen, 1986), pp. 203– 84, esp. 248ff. 96 Cf. B. Bischoff, “Living with the Satirists,” in id., Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und Literaturgeschichte 3 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 260 –70. 97 On Rupert, see J. van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983); M. Arduini, Rupert von Deutz (1079 –1129) und der “status christianitatis” seiner Zeit. Symbolisch-prophetische Deutung der Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1986) and ead., Neue Studien über Rupert von Deutz, Siegburger Studien 17 (Siegburg, 1985), with ample references to her previous publications. 98 “quod idem evangelium . . . . post tantum doctorem ruminare praesumpsi, multumque indignantur quasi novo homini, quod me antiquae nobilitati inserere vel etiam praeferre per superbiae spiritum ausus sim.” Ruperti Tuitiensis Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Johannis, ed. R. Haacke, CCCM 9 (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 1,20–24. 99 On Cuno see J. Semmler, Die Klosterreform von Siegburg. Ihre Ausbreitung und ihr Reformprogramm im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, Rheinisches Archiv 53 (Bonn, 1954), p. 46; on Rupert at Siegburg, see ibid., pp. 372–76 and see further below, p. 00. 100 Commentaria in Johannem, ed. Haacke, pp. 3, 67–78. 101 Cf. van Engen, Rupert, pp. 102ff. 102 Cf. Arduini, Neue Studien, pp. 55ff; for the heresy-”trial,” ibid., pp. 61– 63 and ead., “Ruperto, san Norberto e Abelardo. Per l’edizione delle ‘Opera minora Ruperti abbatis Tuitiensis’,” in Medioevo e latinità in memoria di S. Franceschini, ed. A. Ambrosini (Milan, 1993), pp. 51–92. 103 Commentaria in Johannem, ed. Haacke, p. 466,2070ff.

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Rupert was no magister proclaiming his message to the unwashed plebs. Writing on the Gospel of John, he remained within the conﬁnes of the clergy, where he was determined to assert his licentia tractandi. Comparable in sense to Philip of Harvengt’s licentia loquendi, that expression occurs in the prologue to the commentary on Apocalypse which Rupert addressed to Archbishop Frederick of Cologne in 1119 –21. Attacked for his views on the Eucharist, the beleaguered author explained, in his work on the Benedictine rule, that he had been arraigned before the archdeacon of his district by opponents who attempted “to have his licentia scribendi totally withdrawn.”104 The right that Rupert claimed against them is described in revealing terms: “holy scripture is an exceedingly spacious ﬁeld held in common by all Christians, and no one can be denied the right to work [⫽ discuss] it, providing that the faith is preserved.”105 This image of common ground, vast in its spaciousness, is coupled with a sense of bounds beyond which it was illicit to venture. The inﬁnite variety of a forest, the bottomless profundity of an abyss, or the immeasurable sweep of the sea—traditional metaphors for the hermeneutic richness of the Bible106 —were rejected by Rupert in favor of one that combined freedom with responsibility. If the commentator’s licentia tractandi was supported by the polyvalence of scripture—by what he called the “individual words with their hidden, multiple meanings”—his liberty was not immanent in the text but guaranteed from the outside. Approved by Rupert’s superior, who oversaw him as he “inveighed against heretics,” his work had been shown in advance to Abbot Cuno of Siegburg, who had read chapters aloud to Archbishop Frederick. Only after appealing to them did the defamed author assert a right to speak when the fathers were silent. Presenting his own contribution as an act of continuity, Rupert had learned not to assert what Abelard appeared to assume: a freedom to correct tradition where it erred and to provide what it lacked. Precautions taken and submission shown, the one acquired the nil obstat of the hierarchy that condemned the other. After censura praevia, even the omissions of Saint Augustine might be rectiﬁed with impunity. No Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books, no Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition was required, in the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century, to establish the difference between licentia and licentiousness. 104 “omnis mihi licentia scribendi tolleretur.” PL 170, 495. On the date of the commentary, cf. Arduini, Neue Studien, pp. 65 – 66; on the controversy, van Engen, Rupert, pp. 143ff. and 162ff. 105 “Ad haec inquam: ‘Nimirum sanctarum spatiosus ager scripturarum omnibus Christi confessoribus communis et tractandi illas nulli iure negari potest licentia, dummodo salva ﬁde.’ PL 169, 827–28. 106 For these images, see de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1, 2, pp. 119ff.

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Before the establishment of an institution, a mentality may exist. Censorship, both a method or procedure and an attitude of mind, was not invented in the age of the printed book. Throughout the High Middle Ages, restraint was exercised on writers; and the consequent tension between authority and deviance forms a theme of their work. Then as now, an illdeﬁned term was used to describe, or to proscribe, trespassers beyond limits the church was beginning to lay down. That term was heresy. Not an explanation but a slogan, intellectual heresy was also a charge that remained, throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, imprecise in its multiple meanings and liable to rebound on those who abused it. Many were inclined to do so. Abelard was not alone.107 Disinclined to put pen to paper without an enemy in mind, he asserted his own auctoritas by denigrating that of others. And because the magisterium to which he aspired could be seen as a challenge to that of the hierarchy, the church intervened—not in order to stiﬂe debate, but to establish its context. The licentia docendi issued later in the twelfth century on the authority of the bishop or chancellor made plain some of the conditions according to which the teaching ofﬁce was held.108 Derived less from the status or learning of individual magistri than from the ecclesiastical order to which they were subordinate, freedom to teach combined with acknowledgment of oversight to accelerate the development of voluntary censorship. When, probably in the 1130s, a certain Bernard (not of Clairvaux) sent Cardinal Matthew of Albano a sermon, he appended a request to emend it, attaching an ivory-handled knife for the purpose of erasure.109 Censura, as Bernard understood it, was simple and tangible. Sixty years later, in response to Ralph Niger’s own demand that his scriptural commentaries be corrected before publication, Pope Clement III commissioned Cardinal William of the White Hands, archbishop of Sens,110 to ﬁnd experts capa107 See H. G. Walther, “Haeretica pravitas und Ekklesiologie. Zum Verhältnis von kirchlichem Ketzerbegriff und päpstlicher Ketzerpolitik von der zweiten Hälfte des XII. bis ins erste Drittel des XIII. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Mächte des Guten und Bösen, ed. A. Zimmermann, Miscellanea Medievalia 11 (Berlin, 1977), pp. 286– 314 and E. Peters, “Transgressing the Limits Set by the Fathers: Authority and Impious Exegesis in Medieval Thought,” in Christendom and Its Discontents. Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000 –1500, ed. S. Waugh and P. Diehl (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 338 – 57. 108 See G. Post, “Alexander III, the Licentia docendi, and the Rise of the Universities,” in Anniversary Essays in Medieval History by Students of C. H. Haskins, ed. C. Taylor and J. La Monte (Boston, 1929), pp. 255 –77. Cf. A. Bernstein, “Magisterium and License: Corporate Autonomy against Papal Authority in the Medieval University of Paris,” Viator 9 (1978), pp. 291–307 and A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1985), pp. 213ff. 109 Flahiff, “Ecclesiastical Censorship,” p. 12. 110 On William see J. R. Williams, “William of the White Hands and Men of Letters,” in Anniversary Essays, ed Taylor and La Monte, pp. 365– 88, especially 370, and W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley, 1973), p. 612.

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ble of assessing them. The author was in search of approval which, after a report on his work, he duly received.111 Censura praevia, the existence of which is sometimes denied,112 acted both as a form of surveillance and as a means of acquiring support. Its advantages were reciprocal. Elicited by the author and performed by the ecclesiastical authorities with increasing frequency in the course of the twelfth century, it soon acquired a structure that was to prove enduring. The procedure adopted to examine Ralph Niger’s work—the appointment by the local ordinarius of a commission whose ﬁndings were submitted to Rome—differed in only one respect from that undertaken, four hundred years later, in the case of Niccolò Machiavelli.113 That difference went by the name of the Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books.114 Created in 1571, this institution was new. New as a central agency of the Roman curia, and novel in its short-lived aim of total control. Anything but innovative, however, were the practices adopted by members of the Congregation. Nothing is longer than the memory of the Catholic church, and the censors of the sixteenth century were able to draw on an ecclesiastical tradition that reached back to, and beyond, the twelfth. But if in this, as in other ﬁelds of study, there is compelling evidence for the theory of the longue durée, the development of censorship, from the Middle Ages into the Reformation, cannot be fathomed by a crude distinction between “liberty” and “repression.” Behind that antithesis (or cliché) lurks the spirit of romanticism with anticlerical overtones that made Abelard into a champion of “free thought” and represented the intellectual history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a struggle between nascent “rationalists” (generally equated with dialecticians) and “antidialectical” obscurantists (often identiﬁed with monks) who enlisted the hierarchy in their attempt to halt progress.115 Progress is relative. Relative to prohibition or the ﬂames, the voluntary submission of a work to authority and its consequent emendment or ex111

Flahiff, “Ecclesiastical Censorship,” pp. 17ff. “. . . in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance . . . pre-publication censorship simply did not exist.” J. D’Amico, “Manuscripts,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1988), p. 20. 113 See P. Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli. Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, 1998), pp. 328ff. 114 Cf. S. Seidel Menchi, “La Congregazione dell’ Indice,” in L’apertura degli archivi del Sant’ Ufﬁzio Romano, Atti dei Convegni Lincei 142 (Rome, 1998), pp. 30 – 45. 115 For the persistence of these clichés, cf. W. Kluxen, “Institution und Ideengeschichte. Zur geschichtlichen Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Universität,” in Philosophy and Learning in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Hoenen (Leiden, 1995), pp. 3–16, esp. 8ff. More balanced is M. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400 –1400 (New Haven, 1997), pp. 165ff. See further T. Holpainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (Leiden, 1996), pp. 6 – 43, 156– 60, and below. 112

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purgation may be considered “liberal” alternatives, as Abelard had cause to reﬂect at Cluny. There as elsewhere, tolerance co-existed with control; and both tendencies are attested in the same period—frequently in the same person playing, successively, the roles of “dialectician” and “antidialectician”—long before the Peripateticus Palatinus raised his strident voice on the subject. Seldom noted or linked with one another by those who view the context of culture solely in institutional terms, these phenomena are commonly relegated to the category of “prehistory.” Fabricated out of embarrassment at less tractable types of evidence than anathemas by popes, prohibitions by councils, or interventions by bishops, this pseudo-category did not exist in the High Middle Ages. Then censorship, arising from the conﬂict (potential or real) between the aspirations of the writer and the policies of his superiors, was discussed in genres of Latin litteratura that ranged from theological treatises and philosophical tracts to speculative prose and satirical verse. Some of them written before the conﬂict between Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux enable us to trace, in the eleventh century, the emergence of tensions that came to a head in the twelfth. Such texts, however, demand a different approach from an episcopal charter or a papal bull. Their language is ﬁgurative, their concepts metaphorical. To appreciate the implications, both expressed and implicit, of what their authors had to say about censura, attention should be paid to the ways in which they said it. Consider, for example, how Saint Peter Damian, in 1067, employed the metaphor of silence: Let the raging tongue now acquire a sense of shame—incapable of eloquence, may it at least learn speechlessness. Ignorant of how to construct a case that ediﬁes, let it at all events grasp how to avoid words without imperiling the faith. Otherwise may it be circumcised with its own knife as punishment, should it fail to impose a curb on itself through the discipline of silence. Let those who wish to conduct windy discussions do so in keeping with the style and structure of debate, providing that they do not offend the creator by their contorted arguments and puerile croonings from the schools. Let them know that what they deem impossible lies in the very nature of things and in verbal deductions drawn from their discipline that have nothing to do with God’s power, for there does not exist an object that can escape the force of His heavenly majesty. From which it follows that it is only according to natural order and linguistic convention that one may say: “If a thing exists, as long as it exists, it cannot but exist; and if it has existed, it cannot but have existed; and if it shall exist, it cannot but exist in the future.” On the other hand, what is there that God cannot overturn contrary to its intrinsic and natural structure or existential basis? What is there that God is unable to create in a new fashion? Let them debate, therefore, according to the pygmaean standards of their

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scholarship—of which they possess only a smattering—and not presume to aspire to the heights of the divine mysteries.116

Shocked by the claims of competence in theological matters made by exponents of the trivium, Peter Damian criticized the arts of language that he had taught after being trained in them at Parma.117 Advocating silence with the eloquence of an orator and the agility of a dialectician, he formulated a paradox tinged with autobiographical irony. For one of the masters skillfully castigated in this passage is Peter’s previous self. Censured but not quashed, the irrepressible orator and dialectician employs the methods he appears to condemn. The optative subjunctives, strategically positioned at the beginning of each sentence; the balanced clauses ringing with anaphora and antithesis; the string of syllogisms, labored in its list of double negatives; the severe tone modulated by the gentle comedy of abuse (scolaris infantiae nenias, modulum suum litterarum) lead to a conclusion that is more rhetorical than reasoned. Ratio, for Peter Damian, is divine, omnipotent, transcendent. It begins where dialectic ends.118 Incapable of grasping these higher truths, human reasoning should acknowledge the boundaries of controlled speech. Control, not prohibition, was the issue that the debaters, gossips, and wags of Peter’s generation failed to grasp. Setting themselves up as censors of the faith, presumptuous dialecticians and rhetoricians lacked any sense of limitation, all feeling for measure.119 With the assertion that they had found an an116 “Erubescat iam lingua frenetica et, quae nescit esse facunda, discat esse uel muta. Nescit aediﬁcationis augmenta depromere, sciat saltim sine ﬁdei destructione tacere. Alioquin abscidatur sibi ferro praeputium per uindictam, nisi sibi frenum adhibeat per silentii disciplinam. Ventilent quaestiones suas, qui uolunt, iuxta modum et ordinem disserendi, dum modo per ambages suas et scolaris infantiae nenias contumeliam non inferant creatori; sciantque inpossibilitatem istam in ipsa rerum esse natura et uerborum ex arte procedentium consequentia, non ad uirtutem pertinere diuinam, nichilque supernae maiestatis euadere posse potentiam, ut dicatur iuxta solius naturae ordinem uerborumque conditionem: ‘si est aliquid, quamdiu est, non potest non esse; et si fuit, non potest non fuisse; et si futurum est, non potest futurum non esse.’ Alioquin contra ipsius naturalis proprietatis ordinem existendique materiem quid est quod Deus non possit euertere? Quid est quod Deus non ualeat noua conditione creare? Discutiant itaque iuxta modulum suum litterarum dumtaxat— quibus adhuc indigent elementa—nec altiora se usurpent diuina mysteria.” Pierre Damien, Lettre sur la toute-puissance divine, in De divina omnipotentia 14, 22– 43, ed. A. Cantin, Sources chrétiennes 191 (Paris, 1972), p. 460. 117 On the education and culture of Peter Damian, see best A. Cantin, Les Sciences séculières et la foi: Les deux voies de la science au jugement de S. Pierre Damien (1007–1072) (Spoleto, 1975). 118 See Cantin, “Ratio et Auctoritas de Pierre Damien à Anselme,” Revue des études augustiniennes 18 (1977), pp. 152–79 and cf. L. Moonan, “Impossibility and Peter Damian,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 12 (1980), pp. 146 – 63. 119 Cf. Cantin in Pierre Damien, Lettre, pp. 239ff. and id., Les Sciences séculières, p. 624.

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swer to every question, they demonstrated their ignorance of the true learning that is obedience to God’s will.120 False pretenders to a universal magisterium, they are here urged to atone for their faults by undergoing circumcision (abscidatur sibi ferro praeputium per vindictam). The allusion was to the Letter to the Romans (3:30): unus [est] Deus, qui iustiﬁcabit circumcisionem ex ﬁde et praeputium per ﬁdem. If the Jews and the Gentiles are equal both by and through the faith, those who violate its order or exceed its bounds should be admitted to the fold only after submitting to punishment. Yet circumcision, interpreted as an act of obedience that did not guarantee grace,121 is distinct from castration. Painful though the experience may be for an ambitious magister, it need not lead to intellectual impotence.122 Witness the virile purple that colors the cardinal’s prose. Subtly insinuating his triumph over the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, it exempliﬁes Peter Damian’s ideal of self-restraint. Ten years earlier, in the autumn of 1057, that dedicated reformer and reluctant prelate had written to his colleagues at the Lateran, urging them to lead exemplary lives: Let there be read, in our conduct, what is ﬁttingly done and properly avoided; may idle words not babble forth from our lips; the censorship of discerning silence curb our priestly tongues and jokes not sap our self-control, nor unrestrained gaiety throw our feelings into turmoil! Away with childish pranks, sarcastic eloquence, and the sophisticated gift of the gab! Watch out for witty repartee, lest from time to time our conversation be adulterated with ﬁction!123

Worldly fabula avoided in the interests of holy veritas, the truth that Peter desired to communicate was so intimidating that not only the clergy, of which he and his fellow-cardinals were magistri, but also the laity inclined to smile or banter would put its ﬁnger to its lips and hold its tongue in terror.124 120

Cantin, Les Sciences séculières, pp. 476 and 498. See Landgraf, Dogmengeschichte 3,1, pp. 61– 87, esp. 63. 122 Cf. B. Bultot, La Doctrine du mépris du monde en Occident, de S. Ambroise à Innocent III, 4,1: Le xie siècle. Pierre Damien (Louvain, 1963), pp. 112ff. 123 “In vita nostra legatur, quid agi, quid vitari conveniat; ex labiis nostris verba otiosa non efﬂuant; sacerdotalem linguam discreti silentii censura compescat; non ioci solvant, non pectus nostrum laetitia immoderata concutiat! Puerilis ludus abscedat, mordax eloquentia, urbana dicacitas evanescat! Caveantur scurrilia verba, nec aliquando misceantur fabulosa colloquia!” Ep. 48, ed. K. Reindel, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, MGH, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 4, 2 (Munich, 1988), p. 60,3 –7. 124 “Quia igitur, dilectissimi, non modo sacerdotes sed et sacerdotum vos decet esse magistros, necesse est, ut vita vestra quasi quaedam sit linea, et velut adamantis signaculum, quod vivendi caeteris adhibeat formam. Adamantinum quippe sigillum suam caeteris imprimit, a nullis vero metallis imaginem sumit. [. . .] Sic alios hylaritatis nostrae dulcedo demulceat, ut 121

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31

Terriﬁed or amused by such a stylish censor, neither an educated member of the laity nor a cultivated cleric could fail to note that here, as in De divina omnipotentia, Peter Damian commanded all the qualities he professed to deplore. Sarcastic (mordax) and sophisticated (urbana), his vivid Latin argues a case for simplicity belied by its verbal artiﬁce. Commending solemnity with witty charm, this admonition by the cardinal-bishop of Ostia tactfully avoids addressing the other members of the curial hierarchy de haut en bas.125 If their lives were to be a book, between the lines of its message a humane and humorous tolerance was legible to the discerning reader. Communicated through the irony generated by the clash of form and content that tempers his tone, it reveals how well Peter Damian understood that, if he wished to put the arts of the trivium in their place, he needed to show that he had mastered them. Peter’s version of silence neither enforced muteness nor recommended taciturnity. It was a metaphor for auto-censorship that admitted the trivium within limits. Established by acknowledgment of the inviolability of the divine mysteries, those limits were transgressed, in a different direction, when the Cistercian critics of the magistri caricatured Peter’s ideal into a libido tacendi during the next century.126 So argued William of Conches against the “lust for silence,” imposed not on oneself but on others, which he attributed to the likes of Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry. The transformation of this metaphor is indicative of a movement in high culture—away from the ﬂexible and voluntary concept of censura espoused by Peter Damian to blunt notions of prohibition and punishment. In the process the universality of claims being made by teachers of the trivium altered into the defensive elitism of concordantia artium. How that process unfolded—how it was reﬂected and refracted in literature—are some of the questions asked in the following pages. Their starting-point is where writers themselves began to learn their craft—inside or outside the monastery, with the study of grammatica, its practice, and its relationship to the other “trivial” artes. severitas nostra sese in petulantiam vel lasciviam non resolvat. Ridere quis vel leviter loqui incipiens, si nos repente conspexerit, verbum supprimat, ori digitum superponat, territus obmutescat.” Ibid., p. 61,3 –17. 125 Cf. E. Pásztor, “S. Pier Damiani, il cardinalato e la formazione della Curia Romana,” Studi Gregoriani 10 (1975), pp. 317– 39 and L. Spätling, “Kardinalat und Kollegialität,” Antonianum 45 (1970), pp. 273 – 86, esp. 278ff. 126 Philosophia mundi 1, 13, 45, ed. G. Maurach (Pretoria, 1980), p. 40. Cf. Juvenal 2.8 – 9 and 2.14.

H

H

II UNBUTTONED DWARVES

N

OT DWARVES decorously perched on the shoulders of giants, but a horde of riotous midgets exhibiting themselves on the shores of Lake Tegernsee: such was the scene imagined by the monk Froumond († ante 1012) during the last decade of the tenth century.1 Froumond, when writing for insiders—for an audience in the community where he taught that included, among the brothers and their pupils, a number of the nobiles whose milieu is stylized so graphically in the Ruodlieb 2 — was an engaging eccentric and a bawdy wit. But he adopted more solemn tones when he appeared, as an encomiast, on the ofﬁcial stage of Latin letters. There convention and orthodoxy dictated that Froumond observe the rules of the “higher” public genres. This distinction between the public and the private3 —between what might be composed for display within the precincts of the cloister and what was unsuitable for show outside them—has seldom been applied to the “school literature” of the eleventh- and twelfth-century grammatici. Yet it invites, and enables, us to reﬂect on the nature, origins, and purpose both of Froumond’s work and that of his successor at Tegernsee, the author of the Ruodlieb, whose poem slumbered in the dust of the monastery’s library until waking to unexpected celebrity as a futuristic romance. Futuristic, in the sense that the Ruodlieb is taken only to look forward and never to look back.4 Much attention has been paid to the routes its author is claimed to have taken; less to the paths he elected not to follow. Yet negative choices—the urge to differ, to modify, to alter—can shed light on an author’s intentions 1 Still valuable is J. Kempf, Froumund von Tegernsee, Programm des königlichen Gymnasiums in München (Munich, 1900). See too C. Eder in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon 2 (1980), 978 – 82; G. Bernt in Christenleben im Wandel der Zeit 1, ed. G. Schwaiger (München, 1987), pp. 49– 55 and G. Sporbeck in Kaiserin Theophanu. Begegnungen des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends 1, ed. A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (Cologne, 1991), pp. 369 –78. 2 All references are to the edition of the Ruodlieb by B. Vollmann, in Frühe Deutsche und Lateinische Literatur in Deutschland, 800–1150, ed. W. Haug (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 388–551. 3 See P. von Moos, “Die Begriffe ‘öffentlich’ und ‘privat’ in der Geschichte und bei den Historikern,” Saeculum 29 (1998), pp. 161– 92. 4 See P. Godman, “The Ruodlieb and Verse Romance in the Latin Middle Ages,” in Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption, ed. M. Picone (Basle, 1997), pp. 245–71, esp. 245–47.

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and achievement. And they are particularly pertinent to the assessment of an intelligent writer in Latin, for whom the legacy of the past, whether accepted or declined, was an issue raised by his very medium. The Ruodlieb was probably composed during the ﬁnal quarter of the eleventh century at Tegernsee, a thriving center of culture in southern Germany. What its author owed to this milieu deserves investigation. If he was the beneﬁciary of a local heritage that he chose to transform, was his text intended as a response to its context? Or was the writer a rebel against the traditions of Tegernsee? At Tegernsee Froumond exercised a lasting inﬂuence. The poetry that he offered to his pupils provides us with an insight into the literary culture of this monastic milieu.5 Consider, for example, these lines he composed to entertain his charges at the cloister-school: Now I shall make up different kinds of amusing verse. . . . Let Gitto, with his parti-colored robe, be ﬁrst in line, with broken shoes hung all about him, followed by a horde of dwarves joyfully singing odes to raise a laugh. Loosen your belts, your “tails,” dwarves, and shake with a quiver your ragged clothes.6

The ﬁrst dwarf in German literature, we are told,7 makes his appearance in the Ruodlieb. There his presence is ascribed to “folk-motifs.”8 The army of singing dwarves that Froumund conjures up here disposes of the ﬁrst claim and casts doubt on the second. For the putative presence of nani at Tegernsee has nothing to do with “Germanic traditions”9 or with “performances that mimic animals.”10 It is Froumund’s learned imagination that is at work, his penchant for extravagant fantasy.

5 See K. Strecker, Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung (Froumund), MGH, Epistolae Selectae 3 (Berlin, 1925) and B. Schneider, “Die Briefsammlung Froumunds von Tegernsee,” Historisches Jahrbuch 62– 64 (1949), pp. 220 – 38. 6 “Nunc varios sum fac⬍turus⬎ cum carmine ludos. . . / Hic habitu vario sit primus in ordine Gitto, / Calceus et ruptus circum sibi pendeat omnis, / Quem sequitur gaudens nanorum exercitus odis, / Ut faciant risum. Suspendite cingula, caudas, / Pannosas vestes trepidimine porgite, nani. . . .’” Carm. 19, 14, v. 17–21, ed. Strecker, p. 54. 7 C. Lecouteux, Les Monstres dans la littérature allemande du Moyen Age. Contribution à l’ étude du merveilleux médiéval (Göppingen, 1982), p. 57. 8 H. M. Gamer, “Der Ruodlieb und die Tradition,” in Mittellateinische Dichtung, ed. K. Langosch (Darmstadt, 1969), pp. 284– 329, esp. 305 and cf. B. Vollmann, Ruodlieb (Darmstadt, 1993), pp. 39 – 40. 9 Gamer, “Ruodlieb,” passim. On representations of the dwarf in Germanic literature, see C. Lecouteux, “Zwerge und Verwandte,” Euphorion 75 (1981), pp. 366 –78. Bibliography in R. Simek, Lexikon der germanischen Mythologie (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 475 –77. 10 J. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals. Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750 –1150 (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 149.

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The dwarf as a ﬁgure of fun is attested in Roman literature, particularly satire.11 Juvenal, at Satire 13.168ff. writes: The pygmy runs, like a warrior in midget arms; soon vanquished by his foe, he is seized by a wild crane and carried aloft in its forked talons: were you to see this among our people, you’d shake with laughter.12

So too with the calceus—for the shoe, together with the toga, was one of the requisite features of Roman dress;13 and a calceus ruptus indicated slackness or poverty that made the citizen into a laughing stock: Nothing gives rise to more universal laughter . . . than if a toga is grubby and one of his shoes gapes open with split leather . . .14

Combine the two comic ﬁgures—the broken shoe and the dwarf—and one savors, with a chuckle, the ingredients of Froumund’s wit. To relish it in full, however, another condiment must be added: the dwarves of this poem (v. 20) are discincti—“disheveled,” with the metaphorical sense of “dissolute.” Both senses are at play here for, through their tattered garments loosened from their belts, these uninhibited midgets display caudas—a pun with the same connotations of the penis as the German Schwanz.15 The scantily clad army of pygmaean performers,16 like Gitto with his broken shoe, form part of a theme aptly described as “living with the satirists.”17 They show us what an ingenious Tegernsee poet presented to his students as an alternative to the dreary pabulum of the classroom. 11 See P. Howell, A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial (London, 1980), p. 205 (on I.43,10); Der kleine Pauly 5 (Stuttgart, 1979), p. 1567. Cf. Paulys Realencyclopädie 23 (Stuttgart, 1959), pp. 2064 –74. 12 “Pygmaeus paruis currit bellator in armis, / mox inpar hosti raptusque per aera curuis / unguibus a saeva fertur grue: si videas hoc / gentibus in nostris, risu quatiare . . . ” 13 See E. Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London, 1980), p. 175 (ad 3.147, with further references). 14 “Quid quod materiam praebet causasque iocorum / omnibus hic idem, . . . / si toga sordidula est et rupta calceus alter / pelle patet . . .” (3.147– 50). 15 See J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), pp. 35– 37, 221. For the legends (derived ultimately from Aristotle) of dwarves’ abnormal penises, cf. V. Dasen, Dwarves in Ancient Egypt and Greece (Oxford, 1993), pp. 10, 236ff. 16 For nanus in the (theatrical) sense of “fool” or “buffoon,” see F. Blatt, Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis, M-N (Hafn, 1969), p. 1052,35ff. (on this passage). To be distinguished from the (uncommon and later) ﬁgure of the court dwarf in vernacular literature, on which see V. J. Howard, Jr., The Dwarves of Arthurian and Celtic Tradition (London, 1958), pp. 21–27. 17 See Bischoff, “Living with the Satirists,” in id., Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und Literargeschichte 3 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 260 –70.

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The dwarves of Froumund’s work represent a version of the scurrae, ioculatores, and histriones of clerical condemnations.18 They reﬂect a combination of the outré and the erudite, of delectatio and utilitas 19 that is characteristic of the literature written at Tegernsee before the Ruodlieb. Both classical and Carolingian poetry inﬂuenced Froumund, but the imprint of his models is less pronounced than his divergences from them. Receptive yet independent, he was more than a parodist, inclining to a satirical, subversive humor that ranged beyond the familiar bounds of comedy into unexplored realms of the burlesque. And if Froumund’s tastes were unconventional, the aim of his art is described in a related poem. With a list of adynata couched in the hypothetical subjunctive, he mocks the composition of “fables” as no less ludicrous, in a classroom context, than singing Lieder.20 What he offered his pupils instead was neither mime nor fabula nor vernacular verse but a sophisticated Latin ludus: For I’ve decided that it would be better to entertain you with poetry that boosts your I.Q.21

That capacity was to be enhanced by the sport (ludus) of inverting orthodox models. It animates the verse that Froumund wrote for, and about, the community at Tegernsee. A sample is provided by these savage lines on the brother who had failed in his duty of providing pigskin coverings for the monks in winter: It’s now the time at which we all say: “Hoo, hoo!” but no pig has ever been caught with this word. You indeed ﬂee from me; you will never revive me: please! A pig is often captured by dogs: repelled by me, you ﬂee afar, never ensnared by pity for those torments that oppress me on all sides. I wish you were a pig so that I could lay hands on you, skin you with violence and slit your throat with my blunt knife, anointing with blood my legs that are wracked by the cold, and substituting your worthless skin for down!

18 J. Suchomski, ‘Delectatio’ und ‘Utilitas’. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur (Berne and Munich, 1975), pp. 24ff. 19 Ibid., pp. 67ff. 20 “Si facerem mihi pendentes per cingula caudas / Gesticulans manibus, lubrice stans pedibus, / Si lupus aut ursus, vel vellem ﬁngere vulpem, / si larvas facerem furciferis manibus, / Dulcifer aut fabulas nossem componere, menda, / Orpheus ut cantans Euridicen revocat, / Si canerem, multos dulci modulamine leudos / Undique currentes cum trepidis pedibus / Gauderet, mihi qui propior visurus adesset, / Ridiculus cunctos concuteret pueros.” Carm. 32, 33–42, ed. Strecker, pp. 81– 82. 21 “Ludere carminibus melius namque esse decrevi, / Que faciunt animum crescere et ingenium.” Carm. 32, 47– 48, ibid., p. 82.

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This I should like to do, for you yield to no entreaty. Am I not unclothed by day and semi-naked by night?22

More than one genre of Latin poetry was anticipated by the polyvalent word tempus at the beginning of this work. In a monastic context, it could evoke Matthew 26:18, its connotations of the Passion23 and the ideal of fraternal harmony that is depicted in the tempus erit, quando frater cum fratre loquetur by Alcuin,24 whose theme Froumund stands on its head. Not harmony but strife among the fratres is Froumund’s subject, not the idyll of a realized dream but the vengeance of disappointed hopes. And as the poem brieﬂy awakes expectations of a sacred subject, only to thwart them at length, so it inverts the erotic diction of the “chase of love.”25 Flight and pursuit; longing, struggle, possession: these topoi of amatory verse are turned, or perverted, into a pig-hunt that Froumund projects on his feckless frater, whose imagined capture ends in a delirium of throatslitting and ﬂaying. Naked (not for romantic reasons) in the cold winter nights, the poet contemplates covering himself with the skin of the miscreant monk. The language of love, fraternal and sensual, is debauched in this orgy of comic reversals. Froumund twists formulas of idealization to a terrestrial theme. His bizarre combination of the brutal, the mundane, and the fantastic goes beyond even the boldest parodies of other monastic milieux,26 to achieve a “surrealistic” effect. Perhaps this Tegernsee alternative to utopian, amorous, and animal poetry27 merits the misnomer of “Huhuism.” Huhuism, as practiced at Tegernsee, was intended for the private world of the cloister. The ludi, ribald and idiosyncratic, that Froumund composed for his local audience were withdrawn from the public stage where he appeared, on occasion, in the guise of a conventional encomiast.28 The sec22 “Tempus enim nunc est, ‘hu hu!’ quo dicimus omnes, / Sed tamen hoc verbo nunquam sus prenditur ullus. / Tu me nempe fugis, numquam ex te animabor: amabor! / Sepius et canibus capitur sus; tu mihi pulsus / Longius abscedis, nunquam capieris in illis / Compaciens, que me stringunt atque undique frangunt. / Vellem te esse suem, quod, si te prendere possem, /Pellem vi abstraherem, cultrum sub guttere pinguem / Tinxissem, crura unxissem, que frigora ﬁndunt, / Atque humilem pellem pro vellere ponere vellem! / Hoc facerem, quia tu precibus non ﬂecteris ullis. / Nonne die nudus, quasi nudus nocte recumbo?” Carm. 4, ed. Strecker, p. 21. 23 See A. Blaise, Le Vocabulaire latin des principaux thèmes liturgiques (Turnhout, 1966). 24 Ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Poetae latini Aevi Carolini 1,1 (Berlin, 1880), p. 268. 25 See M. Thiébaux, The Stag of Love. The Chase in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, 1974). 26 B. Bischoff, “Caritas-Lieder,” in id., Mittelalterliche Studien 2, pp. 56 –76 and P. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1963). 27 For Froumund and “beast poetry,” see Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, pp. 148– 49, and below. 28 F. Bittner, Studien zum Herrscherlob in der mittellateinischen Dichtung, diss. Würzburg (Vollach, 1962), pp. 124ff.

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ular panegyrics that he wrote at the adventus, on the departure, and in praise of magnates from whom the monastery hoped for protection and favors were intended to be read aloud or recited.29 Their form and meter are classical, their style as predictable as their contents. In that predictability lay their point. Praise of princes had to be identiﬁable. It was designed to assimilate the individual ruler to an august, because long-standing, lineage of exemplary monarchs.30 Yet for the beneﬁt of his internal milieu, Froumund was capable of dealing tongue in cheek with themes that he treated solemnly for outside patrons. Here is an instance (untranslatable but irresistible), preserved as a model for his pupils, of their master in wry mood: Domino Meo Magistroque M. Miris Moribus Maculosoque Nasu Miriﬁce Munerato Froumundus Fidelis Famulus Famulamina Frequenter Facturus Fidelia. Miri Medicaminis More Magistrali Me Mementote Servare Sequentibus Sanguinis Strenuum Salutaremque Strictorem. Sacro Subscribite Stilo, Sicut Stolidus Stimulat Servus Sermonibus Stultis. Sed Vos Scribite Sapienter Sacras Sequens Scripturas; Sudario Supernite Servare, Siquid Scitis Salutiferum. Spargite Semina, Sicco Sapientiam Servo.31

The anonymous addressee—“Magister M.” (if he existed), “wondrously endowed with a spotted nose”—of Froumund’s mini-epistle could hardly fail to see its point: a burlesque of the mandarin prose he was charged to compose for serious purposes. The rhyming style of the salutatio-formula highlights the grotesque alliteration pioneered, at the end of the ninth century, by Hucbald of Saint-Amand.32 From his works and from those of other Carolingian writers, Froumund learned techniques of parody and inversion that he also studied in older literature, both Latin and Greek. Froumund’s “Hellenism,” unusual in its day,33 led him to the Gesta Apollonii,34 a metrical treatment of the RB-version of the eponymous Historia composed during the tenth century in southwest Germany, possibly at Tegernsee,35 where it was certainly known. Froumund’s interest in the 29 E.g., Carm. 20, ed. Strecker, pp. 57– 58 with W. Bulst, “Susceptacula regum,” in Corona Quernea. Festgabe K. Strecker zum 80. Geburtstage dargebracht (Leipzig, 1941), pp. 133ff. 30 P. Godman, Poets and Emperors. Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987). 31 Ep. 71, ed. Strecker, pp. 79– 80. 32 See Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 178ff. 33 See W. Berschin, Griechisch-lateinisches Mittelalter. Von Hieronymus zu Nikolaus von Kues (Berne, 1980), p. 234; W. Krause, “Fragmente einer griechischen Grammatik,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinischen Gesellschaft 5 (1956), pp. 7–25 and F. Unterkircher, “Der Wiener Froumond-Codex (Cod. 114 der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek),” Codices Manuscripti 12 (1986), pp. 27– 51. 34 Ed. E. Dümmler, MGH, Poetae latini Aevi Carolini, 2, pp. 483 – 506. 35 Cf. F. Brunhölzl, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters 2 (Munich, 1992), p. 614. Against, on (weak) linguistic grounds, G.A.A. Kortekaas, “The Latin Adaptations of

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style of the Gesta is documented by the glosses on it which he copied into a Tegernsee codex of Boethius now in Cracow.36 But there was more in this verse than material of lexical interest, and the Gesta have never received the attention that they deserve. “A wooden concoction”37 that reeks of the schoolroom,38 “sprawling” and shapeless, arbitrary in its use of the dialogue-form:39 so deep has been the perplexity at this much-maligned work that one of its detractors claims that it was intended to be understood not as poetry but history.40 That a tale of incest and adventure, transposed from the terse prose of the RB-version of the Historia Apollonii 41 into Ottonian verse, represented the type of gesta studied in the schools42 is a proposition that now deserves scrutiny. The Gesta Apollonii are cast, at the outset (vv.1–42), as a dialogue between “Strabo” and “Saxo”—names that evoke Saint-Gallen, a monastery to which the foundation-legends of Tegernsee attribute signiﬁcance.43 The magnum nomen of Walahfrid Strabo further suggests a generic expectation: of veiled narrative with contemporary undertones conducted between two speakers, such as his famous De imagine Tetrici.44 So too the Gesta Apollonii begin in an indirect manner, with invitations to “sing” punctiliously declined, an address to the trinity and a mock-modest allusion to nostra . . . Thalia (v. 35). The muse of pastoral, since the eighth century, had played a role in Medieval Latin epic, serving to underscore the poet’s humility and the rusticity with which he pretended to write.45 The topos of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyrii in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 3, ed. H. Hofmann (Groningen, 1990), p. 111. 36 See G. Schepps, “Funde und Studien zu Apollonius Tyrus, Chartarium Farfanense, Boethius und zur lateinischen Glossographie,” Neues Archiv 9 (1884), pp. 172– 94; and C. Eder, Die Schule des Klosters Tegernsee in frühen Mittelalter (Munich, 1972), pp. 38 – 39; plate in Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. von Euw and Schreiner, p. 371. 37 E. Klebs, Die Erzählung von Apollonius aus Tyrus. Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung über ihre lateinische Urform und ihre späteren Bearbeitungen (Berlin, 1899), p. 337. 38 Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters 1 (Munich, 1911), p. 615. 39 P. Dronke, “Ruodlieb, The Emergence of Romance” Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages, New Departures in Poetry 1000 –1150 (Oxford, 1970), p. 86. 40 L. Gompf, “Der Name des Helden. Überlegungen zum Ruodlieb,” in Tradition und Wertung. Festschrift für F. Brunhölzl zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. G. Bernt (Sigmaringen, 1988), p. 150 and n. 19. 41 See G.A.A. Kortekaas, Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (Groningen, 1984), pp. 61ff. 42 Manitius, Geschichte 1, p. 615. 43 L. Tabor, Die Kultur des Klosters Tegernsee im frühen Mittelalter, diss. hist. (Bottrop, 1935), pp. 10ff. For the artistic evidence, cf. E. F. Bange, Eine bayerische Malerschule des XI. und XII. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1923), pp. 6ff. 44 Ed. E. Dümmler, MGH, Poetae latini Aevi Carolini 2 (Berlin, 1884), pp. 370ff. with Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 133ff. 45 Alcuin, Versus de . . . Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae, ed. P. Godman (Oxford, 1982), v. 1597, p. 128 with note ad loc.

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modesty, belied by the elaborate style, is capped by a protest against prolixity,46 undermined by the long-windedness of “Saxo’s” speech. These paradoxes are deliberate. They advertise the writer’s command of tradition, sacred and secular, together with his wish to set his work on a literary level superior to that of its model. The story of Apollonius is presented by this author as elevated but enigmatic, open to reinterpretation. Hence the importance of his divergences from the Historia. The RBversion is transformed by an ironical imagination, responsive to the ambiguities of its model, as is clear from the ﬁrst scenes dealing with Antiochus’s daughter. After being raped by her father, she is stricken by grief and doubt. Chapter 2 of the RB-version of the Historia narrates the plot thus: As the girl was thinking over what she should do, her nurse suddenly entered. When she saw her charge in ﬂoods of tears and the blood splattered on the ﬂoor, she was amazed and said: “Why are you so disturbed?”47

This last sentence is developed, at Gesta vv. 82–85, into an entire speech: “Such a state of mind has not grown from your father’s seed: it was always happy, unacustomed to weep. I perceive a deed that all will decry as heinous: the king will be outraged when he hears of it.”48

Less the princess’s state of mind than her parentage is emphasized by the nurse’s unwitting tactlessness, formulated in terms (de germine patris, v. 82) which, in the wake of the rape, acquire a sinister exactitude. Unconsciously afﬁrming what she denies, the nutrix provokes the following answer: “Nurse whom I love most dearly, why do you chatter on and threaten me in my unhappiness? I have not wept without cause, for I have been deceived by my father’s madness. I realize that I have lost two noble names, since both ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ have lost their meaning.”49 46 “Postulo te, frater, cantum deprome frequenter, / Non me prolixi lasses cum sirmate dicti.” Gesta, vv. 36– 37. 47 “Cumque puella quid faceret cogitaret, nutrix subito introiit. Quam ut uidit ﬂebili uultu aspersoque sanguine pauimento, corruit et ait: ‘Quid sibi uult turbatus animus tuus?’” Kortekaas, ed., p. 281. 48 “Non animus talis crevit de germine patris: / Semper erat laetus, non suevit fundere ﬂetus. / Rem video gestam, quam nemo fatetur honestam. / Rex erit offensus, cum venerit auribus eius.” 49 “Cunctarum nutrix merito carissima nobis, / Verbula quid spargis miserae mihi quidve minaris? / Incassum nostris ﬂetus non ﬂuxit ocellis: / Nam sum dementis furiis decepta parentis. / Nomina nobilium mihi perdita nosco duorum, / Nunc patris et natae periit quia nomen utrimque” (vv. 90 – 95).

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Pleonastic and oblique, this speech of the princess, misunderstood by her nurse, introduces a succession of antitheses between declaration and deed that exceed the simple contrasts of the Historia Apollonii. Antiochus’s daughter, robbed of her ﬁlial identity by her father’s dementia (v. 93), plunges into a crisis that engulfs him also. Not a protector but an oppressor, in both the private and the public domains (v. 119–120), he is alienated from his regal and paternal roles: The madness of the king raged out of control like the savage hawk with its ravening claws. . . .50

Later compared to a wolf (vv. 185ff.), Antiochus, whose treacherous emissary Taliarchus is similarly likened to a fox (vv. 504ff.) and a snake (vv. 519ff.), ﬁnds no refuge in his multiple metamorphoses. Rejecting what he should be, denying what he is, the haunted tyrant of the Gesta eeks out a precarious existence in analogies to birds and beasts of prey. Against this protean specter is set the solid ﬁgure of the perfect prince. Apollonius, unwavering in his resolve, is a youthful sage, 51 master of the tres linguae sacrae:52 Apollonius of Tyre, of noble stock, then a youth in the ﬁrst ﬂower of manhood, father of his country, rich in treasures, dependable in all matters, a master of scholarship, was wondrously learned and expert in various disciplines.53

This represents a departure from the Historia as striking as the avian and bestial similes applied in the Gesta to Antiochus, whose savagery is no match for the civilized ethos of the puer doctus. Distinguished by learning, self-knowledge, and righteous conduct, Apollonius, the ideal nobilis, is contrasted with the unstable rex. This contrast is heightened by means of a burlesque alien to the decorum of political verse. When his followers hesitate to pursue Apollonius, Antiochus attempts to win them over with a mixture of promises and threats.54 Intoxicated like his role-model Attila in the Waltharius,55 Antiochus ebulliently orders his men, after their return, to bring in the head of his enemy. His expectations deﬂated, the tyrant subsides into a drunken slur: 50 “Haud secus effrenis furuit dementia regis / Quam solet accipiter furiosis unguibus asper” (vv. 141–42). 51 Cf. vv. 261ff., 291ff., 319, 415ff. 52 Cf. Kortekaas, “Latin Adaptations,” p. 107. 53 “Tyrus Apollonius clara de stirpe creatus, / Quem tunc primaevum pubes signabat ephebum. / Hic patriae princeps, thesauris valde locuples, / In cunctis ﬁdus, literarum docmate plenus, / Miriﬁce doctus variis fuit artibus auctus”(vv. 190 – 94). 54 vv. 666ff. 55 Cf. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1986), p. 77.

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“My mind, accustomed to repeated sufferings of all kinds, aware of destiny, is not without anguish. Nor does it give me reassurance, scarcely believing what it sees.”56

Banal and pompous, coarse and self-contradictory, Antiochus is reduced to a butt of his empty boasts. Lacking the prescience he claims, he becomes a mere victim of chance, a puppet of the fortuitousness that, in the Historia Apollonii, is a mainspring of the plot. That central element of the lateantique romance is relegated to the wings of the Gesta, where the pervert of power without responsibility is cast as a ﬁgure from the past. At centerstage stands a new kind of hero, nobilis by virtue of his ability to determine and fathom events: the courtly Apollonius, who belongs to the world of Ottonian urbanitas.57 More than a “school-exercise,” more than gesta in the sense of the “deeds of Alexander the Great” or the copy of Dares Phrygius donated to Tegernsee in the eleventh century by “Frater Reginfrid,”58 this underestimated poem, with its mixture of comedy and idealization, both held an understandable appeal for Froumund and treated a subject that was of political relevance to his community at Tegernsee. The monastery did not forgive or forget the loss of its properties in the secularization undertaken by Duke Arnulf of Bavaria,59 even after its refoundation in 979.60 As a Reichskloster, Tegernsee was obliged to contribute to the upkeep of the imperial army, which threatened the monks with impoverishment, as Abbot Sigfrid protested in 1152.61 Against threats of alienation by Henry III, he had to appeal to the privilegia granted by Otto II.62 Contrary to their provisions, which guaranteed the free election of the abbot, the abuse of royal appointments did not cease until after Udalschalk entered ofﬁce in 1091. Similarly, from the lifetime of 56 “Mens mea cunctorum saepissime sueta laborum, / Conscia fatorum, non est secura dolorum. / Nec mihi sic spondet, vix credere visibus audet”(vv. 746 – 48). 57 See C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness. Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals 939–1210 (Philadelphia, 1985), especially pp. 114ff., 143ff. 58 Munich clm. 18541, 1r, edited by Eder, Tegernsee, pp. 114 –15 (95) with n. 331 and p. 148. On the reception of the Historia Apollonii as history, see E. Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre. Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 84ff. Cf. M. Delbouille, “Apollonius de Tyr et les débuts du roman français,” in Mélanges offerts à R. Lejeune 2 (Gembloux, 1969), pp. 1171–1204. 59 F. Tyroller, “Zu den Säkularisationen des Herzogs Arnulf,” Studien und Mitteilungen des Benedikterordens 65 (1953/1956), pp. 303 –12. 60 J. Weissensteiner, Tegernsee, die Bayern und Österreich. Studien zu Tegernseer Geschichtsquellen und der bayerischen Stammessage, Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 133 (Vienna, 1993), pp. 80–83. 61 Ep. 124, ed. Strecker, pp. 140 – 41. 62 Ep. 126 (ibid., pp. 143 – 44) with reference to MGH, Diplomata regum et Imperatorum Germaniae 2 (Hannover, 1888), pp. 219 –20 (no. 192).

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Froumund to that of the Ruodlieb poet, the secular baillifs of Tegernsee, with the solitary exception of Bernhard of Sachsenkam (1068 – 91),63 were detested for their rapacity.64 In the monastery where the Gesta Apollonii were read and the Ruodlieb was written, the oppression of tyrants and the conduct of nobiles were neither topics of polite literature nor themes of entertaining romance. They were issues of survival, matters of life and death. A new lease on life came to Tegernsee with the abbacy of Eberhard II (1068–91),65 during whose tenure of ofﬁce the Ruodlieb poet ﬂourished. A relative of Duke Liutpold of Carinthia, Eberhard brought to the monastery a receptiveness to outside inﬂuence, an openness to the wider world anticipated in the allowance made for mundana philosophia in the last letter that supplements Froumund’s collection.66 In this period of expanding artistic and architectural activity,67 when Tegernsee was consolidating and extending its literary heritage, the Ruodlieb was composed. Its author, in such a context, may be regarded as less of a freak. Contextualization does not diminish his individuality or belittle his achievement, but it does suggest a number of motives for, and impulses behind, his writing. A Herrscherideal was of concern to the community in which the Ruodlieb poet lived. Among his pupils were the nobiles upon whose senses of equity and justice Tegernsee depended. Before him stood the dual precedent set by Froumund—a solemn conformist when composing for the public stage outside the monastery and a witty eccentric when writing for the audience within its conﬁnes. In a style that prized vividness over correctness, Froumund had diverted the bemused brethren and their students with a spectacle of ﬂayed fratres, broken shoes, and unbuttoned dwarves. Against this background of Tegernsee “Huhuism,” the Ruodlieb, so often represented as idiosyncratic, may be viewed as a model of normality. Normality (like progress) is relative. One man’s monk is another’s pig. So Froumund might have formulated the problem—not only tongue-incheek. He thought in terms of inversions, operating by reversal and shock. Hence his pleasure in the Gesta Apollonii, where the oppressor is undermined by subversive satire, and his taste for Juvenal, in whom he found a kindred spirit. Both had a caustic eye for physical defects. Both employed ancient doctrines of physiognomy, which linked appearance and character,68 63

Weissensteiner, Tegernsee, pp. 108ff. Ep. 124, ed. Strecker, p. 141, 6 –7. 65 Tabor, Kultur, pp. 42ff. 66 Ep. 130, ed. Strecker, pp. 146 – 47, especially 9 –12. 67 Tabor, Kultur, pp. 43ff. and Bange, Malerschule, pp. 56ff. 68 See R. Megow, “Antike Physiognomielehre,” Das Altertum 9 (1963), pp. 213 –21. 64

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to pour scorn on the moral shortcomings of their enemies. Yet Froumund goes further. His ridicule knows no bounds. An example is provided by the opening of the poem discussed above, in which the dwarves appear:

12

Why do you rend me so, featherless cuckoo, measuring yourself up to a man, although you’re lazier than a tortoise? Look at you—foaming like froth, about to plummet into the ﬁre! What you have long been, you should never stop being for a moment: become a stinking ball of phlegm, a dung-heap. You pretend that you’re going to compose a song in stylish verse, but the drivel you spout has been cribbed from someone! If you’re up to it, let’s have a poetry competition! Kindly look at me, imbecile, and stop gazing at the clouds! But ﬁrst you should wipe your hand, from which slime is hanging. Oughtn’t you to take a proper bath, since your chest stinks? If you bend your head, you drip with old snot, which you lazily wiped from the hardness of your heart!69

Snot and slime; excrement, putrefaction and stench: this is the obscenity of invective and lampoon.70 It recalls less Juvenal than his precursor, Martial, in such poems as 11, 98, 4ff.,71 and it anticipates the Ruodlieb. Compare the coarseness of the lines above with the quality of the following passage written by a poet educated at Tegernsee and acquainted with Froumond’s verse:

5

A woman, like the moon in the ﬂower of her youth, resembles a senile she-monkey in old age. Her brow, once smooth, is furrowed with wrinkles; her eyes, formerly dovelike, are clouded with darkness; her nose, ﬁlled with snot, drips ﬁlthily, her cheeks, previously ﬁrm, droop with fat, her teeth, lengthened into fangs, quaver on the brink of a fall.

69 “Quid totiens me dilaceras, cuculus sine pennis, / Aequiperans te homini, testudine pigrior omni? / Ecce ut spuma tumes cicius ruiturus in ignes! / Qui dudum fueras, nunquam fore desine ad horas: / Flegmaticus follis sis foetidus atque putredo! / Versiﬁcum carmen ﬁngis te ponere stilo: / Nugula verba facis, discis que nescio de quo. / Si vis, certemus faciendo carmine versus! / Huc, rogo, verte oculos, demens, nec suspice nubes! / Ecce prius tergenda manus, qua mungio pendet, / Non potius purgandus aqua, quia pectora sordent? / 12 Si capud inclinas, vetulo de ﬂegmate guttas, / Quod tibi pigredo detersit pectore duro!” Carm. 19, 1–13, ed. Strecker. 70 Cf. J. Ziolkowski, “Avatars of Ugliness in Medieval Literature,” The Modern Language Review 79 (1984), p. 1–20, esp. 3. 71 “non ulcus acre pusulaeve lucentes, / nec triste mentum sordidique lichenes, / nec labra pingui delibuta cerato, / nec congelati gutta proderit nasi.” On the medieval tradition of Martial’s epigrams, see W. Maaz, Lateinische Epigrammatik im hohen Mittelalter (Hildesheim, 1992), pp. 175ff.

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10

Through them she pokes her gossipy tongue, and when she speaks, it’s as if her mouth is full of ﬂour. Her crooked chin turns back on itself, and her laughing lips, which allured so many, are perpetually open in a gape that scares the crowds. Her neck is as thin as that of a plucked magpie; her breasts, once ﬁrm, are like lumpy hoops, drooping, despondent, in the manner of mushrooms drained of sap. And her golden mane, which previously reached her buttocks, covering her back with each hair ﬁnely combed, sticks up horrendously, terrifying onlookers, as if her head had been dragged, each year, through a hedge. Stooped, her head sticking out between hunched shoulders, she resembles an indolent vulture on the scent of a corpse. And she who, in her youth, used to walk without a belt, pulls her dress up high, to avoid making it dirty, as if she were treading on beans to cook pottage. Her shoes and socks, previously loose, stand as bolt upright as a mattock, kicking up any amount of slimy mud as she goes along. And her slim ﬁngers, once full-ﬂeshed, are now nothing but bones and skin without meat and juice— dirty, wrinkled, gnarled with an excess of soot, her long, cracked nails are black and ﬁlthy.72

15

20

25

30

72 “Femina, que lune par est in ﬂore iuv⬍ente,⬎ / Par vetule simie ﬁt post etate senecte. / (5) Rugis sulcata frons, que fuit antea pl⬍ana,⬎ / Ante columbini sibi stant oculi ten⬍ebrosi;⬎ / Deguttat nasus sordes nimium mucule⬍ntus,⬎ / Dependent bucce quondam pinguedine t⬍ense.⬎ / Dentes oblongi moti stant ut ruitur⬍i,⬎ / (10) Per quos lingua foras pellit locutura fa⬍bellas,⬎ / Et verbum profert, plenum ceu pollinis o⬍s sit.⬎ / Utque recurvatum, resupinum stat sibi m⬍entum,⬎ / Os et risibile, quod plures allicit in se, / Stat semper patulum, populum terrere vel ⬍aptum.⬎ / (15) Stat collum gracile deplumate quasi p⬍ice,⬎ / Extantes mamme iam ceu trochi tube⬍rose⬎ / Molles ut fungi suci pendent vacu⬍ati.⬎ / Et, prius usque nates ⬍qui⬎, crines auricolore⬍s,⬎ / Pendent discretim dorsum velando pil⬍atim⬎, / (20) Extant horribiles terrentes inspici⬍entes,⬎ / Per sepem caput ut anuatim sit sibi t⬍ractum.⬎ / Inclinata caput humeris extantibus ⬍condit⬎ / Ut tardus vultur, ubi scit iacuisse cad⬍aver.⬎ / Et que discincta consueverat ire iuve⬍nta,⬎ / (25) Alte succingit tunicam, ne sordiﬁca⬍ret,⬎ / Calcatura fabas velut et pultem coquitur⬍a.⬎ / Calciamenta sua, que iam fuerant nim⬍is arta,⬎ / Cum soccis laxa ligo ceu stant ante sup⬍ina,⬎ / Sustollunt luti nimium calcando limo⬍si.⬎ / (30) Et graciles digiti, quondam pinguedine pl⬍eni,⬎ / Nunc super ossa cutem sucosa carne care⬍ntem⬎, / Sordent rugosis nimis ex fuligine nod⬍is,⬎ / Unguibus incisis, longis, squalore nige⬍llis.⬎” Vollmann, ed., Ruodlieb 1, fragment 15, vv. 3 – 33, p. 530.

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Confronted with this tour de force at Ruodlieb 14 (⫽ 15), scholarship has retreated into two camps. There are those who offer “analogies” (irrelevant, because later) to twelfth-century descriptions of ugliness and their counterparts, the descriptiones pulchritudinis,73 or tenuous “parallels” to Maximianus and Sidonius.74 Others, positing a rejection of unspeciﬁed rhetorical sources, liken this passage to “La Belle Heaulmière.”75 But why stop with Villon? Such elastic limits can be stretched to include almost any period or culture, as is proved by a solemn comparison between the Ruodlieb and the speeches of Buddha.76 Free association, like humorless pedantry, robs this poem of its speciﬁc achievement. The Ruodlieb was written at a particular time and place, to the stimulus and to the constraints of which its author responded, by transforming the example set by the medieval Martial of Tegernsee. For the canvas painted by Froumund with broad brushstrokes, the Ruodlieb substitutes a miniature of subtler hues. Behind deguttat at verse 7, for example, may be detected the analogy of guttas at Froumund’s Carm. 19, 12, perhaps combined with an echo of Juvenal 10.199: [a hairlessly smooth head] and childishly dripping nose.77

Too remote a comparison? Then consider the preceding lines of the same satire: . . . a misshapen face, of unmatched hideousness, hardly recognizable as itself, an ugly hide instead of skin, hanging jowls and such wrinkles as would you see when an old she-ape scratches in its senile chaps, in the shady glades on the bay of Thabraca.78

The wrinkled brow of v. 5, the likeness to the she-ape of v. 4, and the hanging jowls of v. 8 in the Ruodlieb are drawn from Juvenal’s poem. Martial also offered analogues,79 which our author chose to avoid, preferring instead the more vivid, less vulgar manner of his successor in Roman satire. Familiar with the works written and read by Froumund, the Ruodlieb 73 Cf. F. P. Knapp, Similitudo. Stil und Erzählfunktion von Vergleich und Exempel in der lateinischen, französischen und deutschen Großepik des Hochmittelalters 1 (Vienna, 1975), p. 215. 74 Ibid., pp. 210–12. 75 Dronke, “Ruodlieb,” pp. 52– 53. 76 S. Singer, Germanisch-romanisches Mittelalter (Zürich, 1935), p. 228. 77 “[et iam leve caput] madidique infantia nasi.” 78 “deformem et taetrum ante omnia vultum / dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem / pendentisque genas et talis aspice rugas / quales, umbriferos ubi pandit / Thabraca saltus / in vetula scalpit iam mater simia bucca.” (191– 95). 79 Cf. “rugosiorem cum geras stola frontem / et araneorum cassibus pares mammas.” Carm. 3.93.4–5.

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poet rose to his challenge, while discarding his techniques. Invective is abandoned; limitless burlesque gives way to restrained caricature; and as the inﬂuence of Martial yields place to that of Juvenal, the history of Latin letters repeats itself. Here, as in other purple passages of the Ruodlieb, we are presented with the imagination of a grammaticus trained on satire but capable of discriminating between the alternatives offered by that genre, both ancient and medieval. Apparent even in his depiction of ugliness is a delicacy that eschewed the extremes favored by Froumund and opted for a related but distinct version of enargeia. The choices, negative as well as positive, made by the author of the Ruodlieb drew on wide reading in other genres of Latin literature. Caricature is not the exclusive property of Roman satire; it also occurs in comedy; and both Plautus and Terence have left their traces in the rarer vocabulary and recherché images of the work. The collocation of bucce and [dentes] oblongi at Ruodlieb 8–9, for example, recalls Plautus’ Mercator 639–40; muculentus at v. 7 his Mostellaria 1109; while the unattractive virgins of Terence’s Eunuchus 314ff., with their “thin shoulders and hollow breasts” (demissis umeris . . . vincto pectore . . . gracilae) in contrast to the “ﬁrm body, full of sap” (corpu’ solidum et suci plenum) (ibid., 318; cf. Ruodlieb 14 [⫽ 15], 30–31), also made their mark. The narrow shoes of the decayed beauty’s past at v. 27 evoke a standard feature of Roman elegance; the loose ones of the same verse were, for Ovid (Ars Amatoria 1.516 and 3.444), a sign of slovenliness, like the dirty nails of v. 33 (cf. Ars 1.519 and Metamorphoses 2.478–79). Does an inversion of Ovid’s image of the graceful Diana, her dress girt up for the hunt, at Metamorphoses 10.536, lie behind the graceless vetula of v. 25, plodding with raised tunic through the mud? Are the vulture and the corpse of v. 23 an allusion to Seneca’s satirical metaphor at Ep. 95, 43? Or are they to be related to the romantic’s ideal, direct observation of real life? Questions such as these are not answerable in their own terms, for they presuppose a false division between the object and its representation. The antithesis—life or literature?—is inapplicable to the Ruodlieb, because verisimilitude is a characteristic of the models that its poet adapts with a mixture of erudition and observation comparable to that of the most bookish authors of Alexandrian “realism.”80 Visual detail, perceived with the eye of a satirist and recast with brilliant virtuosity, permeates his writing. These, its constituent elements, form a seamless unity that resists separation. Just as this writer creates an illusion of heightened reality, so he plays with the authority of literary tradition. The ludus, however, had limits— which began at the monastery-gates. 80 See G. Zanker, “The Nature and Origin of Realism in Alexandrian Poetry,” Antike und Abendland 29 (1983), pp. 125 – 45.

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The tradition of collecting classical texts at Tegernsee, instigated by Froumund and continued by Abbot Ellinger,81 can be aligned with that of other Kulturklöster in the “Gorze-circle.”82 Yet no comparison of library catalogues will explain the distinctive use of Roman poetry made by the author of the Ruodlieb. His culture was not that of the scholarly antiquarian but of the creative artist, for whose unconventional style, form, and— above all—theme, the international stage of eleventh-century Latin literature had no room. Composed during the revival of the Gregorian papacy which drew inspiration from the writings of Peter Damian,83 bitter critic of clerici aulici, the Ruodlieb—admired today for its courtly character—invited suspicion. In such an atmosphere, caution dictated that the poem be reserved for the private, but by no means provincial, audience of the cloister-school and withheld from the res publica litterarum which the reformers were attempting to purge.84 Had not Peter Damian thundered, with a din that deafened some to his nuances, against self-indulgence in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic? Were the devotees of such subjects not boastful exhibitionists? Puffed up with pride, they failed to recognize the danger posed by a heresy of the trivium. Jesters with words and showmen of letters, they had nothing more to offer than teatralia grammaticorum gimnasia85 — for the grammaticus who composed the work rich in dramatic and satirical qualities known as the Ruodlieb, motives to conﬁne it to the readership for which it was ﬁrst intended and to keep his head down. Not only for him but also for other writers in the same clerical culture. One of them, nearer to Peter Damian in background and training, chose to ignore the counsel of prudence. Like Peter, Anselm of Besate had been educated at Parma. If Peter Damian was a repentant orator who turned his talents to reform of the church, Anselm of Besate was a spokesman for all that his polar opposite condemned. A clericus aulicus by nature and training, he became chaplain of the Emperor Henry III.86 One of several Ital81 B. Schmeidler, Abt Ellinger von Tegernsee (1017–26 und 1031– 41), Schriftreihe zur bayerischen Landesgeschichte 32 (Munich, 1938), pp. 132– 55, 165 – 85. 82 See R. Kottje, “Klosterbibliotheken und monastische Kultur in der zweiten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts,” in Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–1122), Pubblicazioni dell’ Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore 3,7, Miscellanea del centro di studi medioevali 6 (Milan, 1971), pp. 351–70. 83 See I. G. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest. The Polemical Literature of the Late Eleventh Century (Manchester, 1978), pp. 28ff. 84 B. Hamilton, “S. Pierre Damien et les mouvements monastiques de son temps,” in id., Monastic Reform, Catharism, and the Crusades (900 –1300) (London, 1979), pp. 177–202, and G. Fornasari, Medioevo riformato nel secolo xi. Pier Damiani e Gregorio VII (Naples, 1996), pp. 127–268. 85 Cantin, Les Sciences séculières et la foi (Spoleto, 1975), pp. 64ff., 86ff., 112ff., 158, 166ff. 86 J. Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Könige, 2: Die Hofkapelle im Rahmen der

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ians active in the imperial chancery, he set himself apart from other authors who dedicated their works to the emperor by the exuberance of his polemic and scurrility of his style. With a vain delight in provocation and an indomitable urge to shock, Anselm previewed the role played, a century later, by the Archpoet.87 Addressing that patron of the liberal arts, Henry III, Anselm described his Rhetorimachia as second only to Cicero’s. Expecting the applause of the German Reich, this “peripatetic” had an eye to the main chance when he set his writing in the public domain between rhetoric and dialectic.88 Maior pars civilis scientiae in the Ciceronian sense,89 the Rhetorimachia was capable of serving a political purpose. The eulogy that Anselm began by showering on his own person could be applied to others of higher standing and merits. Panegyric duly followed, offered to the new Caesar Augustus on the model of Virgil. The ideology of Henry III’s renovatio Romani imperii 90 inspired Anselm’s letter of presentation. Law-giving is one of its chief themes, although (or perhaps because) his knowledge of jurisprudence was slight.91 Anselm’s aim was to demonstrate his comprehensive learning, but he understated his own claims, deriving the title of lover of wisdom from the noble lineage of his teachers—Sichelm, for example, equally skilled in law and rhetoric, or Drogo, that paragon of universal scholarship.92 ottonisch-salischen Reichskirche, Schriften des MGH 16/11 (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 257ff. and 269ff. with G. Ladner, Theologie und Politik vor dem Investiturstreit. Abendmahlstreit, Kirchenreform, Cluny und Heinrich III, Veröffentlichungen des österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung 2 (Vienna, 1936), pp. 74ff. 87 See below, Chapter VI. 88 K. Manitius, ed., MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 2 (Weimar, 1958), pp. 95–96. 89 On the theme see best P. von Moos, “Rhetorik, Dialektik, und civilis scientia im Hochmittelalter,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter, ed. J. Fried, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 27 (Munich, 1996), pp. 133 – 55. Fundamental, as background, is J. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary, Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental 58 (Turnhout, 1995). 90 Cf. P. Schramm, Kaiser, Rom, und Renovatio 1 (Berlin, 1929), pp. 229ff. and B. Bischoff, “Caesar, tantus eras,” in id., Mittelalterliche Studien 2, pp. 169 –74, esp. 172. 91 See C.M. Radding, The Origins of Jurisprudence. Pavia and Bologna 850–1150 (New Haven, 1988), p. 91. 92 “Laudes tue itaque cum non minus sint Augusti, sed plurime, erit mihi cum Marone describere, quia etsi non dux phylosophie, amator tamen sapientie. Talium enim doctorum mihi fuit doctrina, quia nulla mihi videtur temeritas in illorum disciplina: tum quidem DROCO phylosophus, ﬂos et Italie decus, tum ALDEPRANDVS ipse facundissimus, tum SICHELMVS liberalium artium peritissimus. Quem ut pre omnibus in suis rethoricis noster habet Tullius, sic Iustinianus pre omnibus in imperialibus suis edictis et legalibus iudiciis. Et nec in iudicandis causis potuit esse exiguus, qui in perorandis satis sonat eximius. Inestimabilis autem DROCO-

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The ﬁgure of the polymath who comes to prominence in the twelfth century makes his début in the Rhetorimachia.93 Advertising Anselm’s credentials, it enabled him to trace his descent from a distinguished background. The arts of the trivium acquired, to the envy of “barbarizing Alemannia,” from the best Italian schools were now turned to praise the German emperor.94 Enthusiastically offering his services for a task Peter Damian viewed with contempt, this clericus aulicus embodied all the pretensions condemned in grammarians, dialecticians, and rhetoricians by the arch-reformer. The risk, however, was calculated. Recently criticized, in a broadside commissioned by the French and Burgundian episcopates, as imperator ille nequissimus,95 Henry III had need of a professional panegyrist; and in the pronouns with which his encomiast comically describes the uniqueness of Drogo (idem vero ipse et iam non alter ipse) may perhaps be detected a parody of the pronomial style in which this invective against the emperor hammered home his exceptional wickedness.96 It was no foolish thought, in the late 1040s, that there might be a place in the imperial entourage for a writer with Anselm’s skills. The deeper and more difﬁcult question is why, during a reign in which more than half the bishops of the Reich were recruited from Henry III’s chapel,97 so patently ambitious an author never achieved the promotion that he coveted. Answers lie in the character of Anselm’s work and in its context. The Rhetorimachia was not the only panegyric offered to Henry III during the 1040s. A handful of years before Anselm of Besate wrote his encomium, Peter Damian had applauded the same emperor differently: Close your ears, most excellent lord, to their poisoned counsels and do not allow the resplendent glory of your fame, which ﬂies through the length and breadth of the world, to be blackened on account of one man! If he should be restored to the episcopal dignity, the hopes of the people, once raised, would fall; the rejoicing of God’s servants would be abolished; and the wickedness of evildoers, recently struck with terror, would regain the conﬁ-

enutritus docmate docet gentes iste, factus ut aiunt ipse. Idem vero ipse et iam non alter ipse. In universis enim eius doctrinis universus et iste nimis.” Rhetorimachia, p. 99,7–21. 93 See below, pp. 294ff. 94 Rhetorimachia, p. 100. 95 Der sogenannte Traktat “De ordinando pontiﬁce.” Ein Rechtsgutachten in Zusammenhang mit der Synode von Sutri (1046), ed. H. Anton (Bonn, 1982), pp. 80,183. 96 Ibid., p. 23. 97 Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle 2, pp. 234ff. and F. Prinz, “Kaiser Heinrich III. Seine widersprüchliche Beurteilung und deren Gründe,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), pp. 529– 48, esp. 534ff.

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dence to do worse with impunity. Therefore, invincible king, carry to its ﬁnal conclusion what you have undertaken in the interests of God’s praise and human salvation and, having expelled that brigand, ordain a pastor to delight the church!98

Not the new Augustus, counter-image to the caricature of imperial depravity drawn by a hostile episcopate, is extolled here but the cleanser of the church who had expelled Archbishop Widger of Ravenna and put Hunfried, chancellor for Italy, in his place. If, in 1049, Anselm of Besate was able to commend himself to one side of Henry III’s public persona, during and after the time when he wrote his letter of dedication, it was the other side that was coming to the fore.99 The accession to the throne of Saint Peter, in February 1049, of the reformer Leo IX intensiﬁed the struggle against simony and clerical marriage, in which the pope was supported by the emperor. Presided over by them both, the synod of Mainz in October of the same year condemned such abuses, solemnizing a partnership between the spiritual and secular powers that led to the appointment of Archbishop Herman of Cologne—then imperial arch-chancellor in Italy—as chancellor of the Roman church. Against this background, Peter Damian sent to Leo IX his most virulent invective against the sexual misconduct of the clergy, the Liber Gomorrhianus, in which critique of abuses was coupled with attacks on those who attempted to defend or extenuate them. “Let there be no ambiguity in anyone’s mind,” declared Damian, about the punishments awaiting offenders; “let no one, with dialectical sophistry, attempt to twist the law by a perverse interpretation of scripture.”100 Sodomy, fornication, and clerical marriage were abominations that should not be palliated by clever arguments or skilful plays with words. Now consider Anselm of Besate. Individual, idiosyncratic, yet proud of his connections with the church of Milan, he lends credence to the report that its members, even when they migrated abroad, were instantly recog98 “Vos autem, excellentissime domine, aures vestras a venenatis eorum consiliis claudite et splendidissimam gloriae vestrae famam, quae per tocius mundi latitudinem volitat, propter unum hominem obfuscare nolite! Si enim ille ad episcopatus arcem revertitur, tocius populi spes, quae erecta fuerat, labitur; servis Dei gaudium tollitur et pravorum nequicia, quae formidare iam coeperat, ad audendum peiora ﬁducialiter roboratur. Quapropter, rex invictissime, quod ad laudem Dei et salutem hominum coepistis, ad ﬁnem usque perducite et latrone reiecto pastorem, unde aecclesia gaudeat, ordinate!” Ep. 20, ed. Reindel, 1, p. 202. 99 Cf. B. Schieffer, “Heinrich III. 1039 –1056,” in Kaisergestalten des Mittelalters, ed. H. Beumann (Munich, 1984), pp. 98 –115, esp. 110 –12. 100 Ep. 31, ed. Reindel, 1, pp. 299 and 302 with the wild, if entertaining, speculation of L. Little, “The Personal Development of Peter Damian,” in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of J. Strayer (Princeton, 1976), pp. 317– 41.

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nizable.101

There, in that divided city, the target of the reformers was the secular clergy, given to marriage and concubinage.102 In his chronicle written shortly after 1100, the elder Landulf describes the emperor’s intervention in 1045 and the strife from which Anselm retreated.103 With him he took to Germany three attitudes characteristic of the Milanese milieu. The ﬁrst was a deep respect for eloquence that Landulf attributed both to Archbishop Guido da Velato (circa proferenda verba vero facundus) and to Anselm da Biaggio, bishop of Lucca (in sermone potens);104 the second a high regard for Henry III, who promoted such gifted orators; and the third—less compatible with Anselm of Besate’s ambitions than he appeared, in 1049, to have realized—was a wish to speak up for the married clergy, voiced in the tenth chapter of his Rhetorimachia.105 No, Anselm hastened to assure those with suspicious minds, it was not that he had succumbed to the temptations of the ﬂesh. Others had fallen while he remained pure: illi quidem quam ego. Nowhere, in the course of this work, are the advantages of a rhetorical training more demonstratively displayed than in its author’s assertion of his own chastity. The strategy was double. Bent on establishing that he matched up to the strictest standards of the reformers, Anselm challenged only their right to lay down the law. The clergy, as he understood and had experienced it at Milan, possessed in uxoribus et ﬁliis libera . . . potestas. Guaranteed by custom, authority, and the sacred canons, their liberty to choose was inviolable. Liberum arbitrium, for Anselm and others, did not imply libertinage. Defending the unreformed clergy, while emphasizing the right and merit of free choice, this master of the ambiguity that Peter Damian sought to eliminate was at variance with the spirit of the Gregorian revival, even as he protested his loyalty to its letter. If Damian, in the Liber Gomorrhianus, was not imprecating against the misuse of argument, authority, and canon law in works like the tenth chapter of the Rhetorimachia, he had accurately identiﬁed the type of clericus aulicus who counted among his 101 “in tantum enim in clericali habitu longa saeculi vetustate ac usitatione multis transactis temporibus vultu, habitu, incessu erant nutriti, ut, si aliquem chori Ambrosiani totius in Burgundia aut in Teutonica aut in Francia litterarum studiis deditum invenires, etiamsi non ultra vidisses, de huius ecclesiae usibus aliquantulum notus, sine mora huius ecclesiae afﬁrmares.” Landulf Senior, Historia Mediolanensis 2, 35, ed. L. Bethmann and W. Wattenbach, MGH Scriptores 8 (reprint Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 70 –71 with C. Violante, La Pataria milanese e la riforma ecclesiastica, 1: La Premesse (1045 –1057) (Rome, 1955), pp. 18ff. 102 See H. Keller, “Patria und Stadtverfassung, Stadtgemeinde und Reform: Mailand im “Investiturstreit,” in Investiturstreit und Verfassung, ed. J. Fleckenstein, Vorträge und Forschungen 17 (Sigmaringen, 1973), pp. 321– 50, esp. 326. 103 Historia Mediolanensis 3, 3, p. 74. 104 On Guido and Anselm, see Violante, Pataria 1, pp. 40ff. and 147ff. 105 Rhetorimachia, pp. 157– 59.

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opponents. Nor is it difﬁcult to understand why, in his second letter to Drogo,106 Anselm of Besate excepted Mainz from the long list of places that had allegedly welcomed his book. Cold-shouldered by the city in which Henry III and Leo IX had recently held the synod that condemned clerical marriage, its two-tongued advocate congratulated himself on becoming imperial chaplain, without seeing that his career had ended where it began. Clever enough to cut a dash in the emperor’s literary circle, Anselm had not been sufﬁciently shrewd to attach himself to the cause that led beyond it. Before reaching the lower level where he was to remain, drawing up charters in the 1050s,107 the erring opportunist had offered, in the Rhetorimachia, his own version of the theme dialectica est ars artium, scientia scientiarum.108 That subject did not require him to claim that he was an apostle of the truth. With verisimilitude as his objective and probability as his guide, Anselm could compose an imaginary speech—a controversia that illustrated the rules of Ciceronian eloquence and contained a treasure-trove of exempla.109 Liberated from the bonds of fact, he was free to exploit the humor of a sermo iocosus.110 But he did so for reasons that were less frivolous and futile than has been thought.111 For Anselm of Besate, often described as a “hyperdialectician,” voiced a critique of that discipline in his Rhetorimachia. Declining to play the role of court jester, he sought to manoeuver himself into the position occupied by later writers of what has been called imperial “propaganda.”112 If propaganda is perhaps too crude a term to describe all the polemical and satirical literature composed, during the twelfth century, to further the cause of the emperor or his supporters in their struggle against the papacy, an analogy may be drawn between Anselm and those men of letters who were to use dialectic and rhetoric in the imperial interest. Disadvantaged 106

Ibid., pp. 181ff. C. Erdmann, Forschungen zur politischen Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters (Berlin, 1951), p. 123. 108 See K. Jacobi, “Diale[c]tica est ars artium, scientia scientiarum,” in “Scientia” und “ars” in Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 22,1, ed. I. Craemer-Ruegenberg (Berlin, 1994), 307–28. 109 Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric, pp. 120 –21; and Rhetorimachia, p. 102. 110 Rhetorimachia, p. 105. 111 Pace H. Cowdrey, “Anselm of Besate and Some North-Italian Scholars of the Eleventh Century,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 23 (1972), pp. 115 –24. 112 See C. Erdmann, “Die Anfänge der staatlichen Propaganda im Investiturstreit,” Historische Zeitschrift 154 (1936), pp. 491– 512 and G. Constable, “Papal, Imperial and Monastic Propaganda in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Prédication et propagande au Moyen Age. Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. G. Makdisi, D. Sourdel, and J. Sourdel-Thomine, Penn-Paris-Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia 3, 20 –25 octobre 1980 (Paris, 1983), 179– 99. 107

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curia,113

in its controversies with the Roman the German chancery was already beginning to need authors capable of defending its master against attacks such as De ordinando pontiﬁce. Invective determining the tenor of debate, Anselm set out to alter its tone. Witty where the moralists were solemn, equivocal where they minced no words, he, like the Archpoet, sought to demonstrate that even the gravest of charges, against himself or others, could be stood on their heads. Retorquere, removere: these technical terms of refutation and reversal, borrowed from Cicero, do not appear by chance at the beginning of the Rhetorimachia. Accustomed to suspicion and denigration, as he informed his teacher Drogo in the epistle dedicatory to his work, Anselm had retreated from the vita civilis to solitude. There, living a profane variant on Peter Damian’s eremetical ideal, he had been arraigned for malpractice and taxed with graver offenses.114 Now was the moment to rebut the charges and make a comeback. But rather than entering the public domain like a brash outsider, Anselm lent his controversia the form of a private quarrel with his cousin Rotiland. All in the family, was the discreet but ambiguous implication, for even arguments employed in a domestic dispute could be applied to issues of greater moment. Contradiction provides the motive force of the Rhetorimachia. Obtrectatio (denigration) countered by remotio (refutation), the dialectical process could turn the techniques of invective against those who misused them. Anselm’s premise was subtle. If no position lacked its contrary, it followed that one could expose the weighty claims of the moralists as empty polemic by playing, successively, the roles of counsel for the prosecution and the defense. That is what he does in the Rhetorimachia, transforming criticisms made of his cousin in the ﬁrst two books into accusations leveled against himself in the third. All of them have an autobiographical ﬂavor; all of them are intended, by anticipating Anselm’s enemies, to disarm them. Take, for instance, the case made against Rotiland’s misuse of learning.115 Learning, in the Rhetorimachia, is often linked with sex. The connection was not casual: the matter was a subject of heated debate. If Peter Damian, product of the same training, recognized the danger posed by sophistical defenders of clerical misconduct, Anselm of Besate set out to expose the casuistry of their critics. Accused of whore-mongering in terms just as violent as those used in the Liber Gomorrhianus, his cousin defended himself by referring to his work as a scribe: “if he had taken such pleasure in gadding about (vagatio), he would not have copied so many books.”116 113 See N. Rubinstein, “Political Rhetoric in the Imperial Chancery during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Medium Aevum 14 (1945), pp. 21– 43, esp. 35 – 36. 114 Rhetorimachia, p. 108 with n. 2. 115 Ibid., pp. 110 and 115. 116 Ibid., p. 131.

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Observe the categories in which this argument is constructed. More than a joke, Rotiland’s answer represents a challenge to the principle of noncontradiction. Innocence is asserted neither by appeal to authority nor by reference to circumstances, but in hypothetical terms of the conditional subjunctive. His conduct impugned, Rotiland subordinates life to language—to the logical (or illogical) rules that governed the linguistic game of dialectic. And because the arbiter of that sport was a self-styled peripateticus, the question of “gadding about” (vagatio) was far from indifferent to him. It was in Anselm’s interest to demonstrate that the rhetoric of condemnation directed against clerici vagantes could be manipulated, with equal facility, both pro and contra.117 So it was that his surrogate Rotiland fell into a trap. Refuted by the countercharge that his scribal activities were undertaken to pay off pimps, the accused cites his knowledge of the trivium: “He would not have known these things, had he taken pleasure in vagatio.”118 A variant on the initial theme of the defense, this argument fails to counter the skepticism toward “trivial” learning being voiced, in authoritative quarters, at the time when the Rhetorimachia was written. With the nonchalance of a reformer ﬂaunting the rules of reasoning, the argument is accordingly reversed: “If it is true that they are not known, then let it also be true that he took pleasure in vagatio.” If reasoning yields to rhetoric, inconsequentiality must prevail. But when a riot of syllogisms has been started, how to stop it? “If you do not know these things, then you take pleasure in vagatio.” From which follows its contrary: “If you take pleasure in vagatio, you do not know these things.” Hence the “corollary” or “conclusion” that one thing cannot be another (si enim hoc, non illud . . . ), which has been seriously adduced as evidence of Anselm’s failure to understand the principle of noncontradiction.119 No 117

Ibid., p. 182. “Que tibi dicis non fuisse cognita, si te delectaret vagacio illa. Non autem sunt cognita, delectat igitur vagacio illa. Hanc enim consecucionem in proposicione ypothetica Aristotelica probat regula, ut: haec non essent cognita, si delectaret vagacio illa. Si vera est: non esse cognita vera sit et: delectet vagacio illa. Vera autem illa, falsa non igitur ista. Cuius assumptionis haec sit proba: questio de unaquaque arte nobis nota. Quae si bene solventur, assumptio nostra vera teneatur, sin bene, minime. Ut interim tamen sit in hac treugua, a nobis et a vobis habeatur vera. Quamquam in eiusdem propositionis conversa consecucione sit ﬁrmum et credibile nulla extrinsecus egens approbacione, ut quae modo sequebatur, nunc antecedat, et quam modo posuimus in assumptione, nunc versa vice ponamus in conclusione; ut, si vera est: delectet vagacio illa, vera sit et: non esse cognita ista. Vera autem illa; huius autem proba: de mentis tue viciis supradicta omnia. Egens nulla proba ergo consequitur ista. Si enim hoc, non illud. Est hoc, non igitur illud. Consecutione igitur etiam conversa ‘grammaticam et caetera’ est ‘non esse cognita.’ Assumptionis vero primae consecucionis probam inferamus, ut ex utraque consecutione ‘illa non esse cognita’ tandem concludamus multaque quae tibi arrogaveras tua eadem propositio tibi abripiat.” Ibid., pp. 131– 32. 119 Ladner, Theologie und Politik, p. 30 – 31. 118

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one, in the eleventh century, understood better how it could be reduced to a farce; and the histories of philosophy that continue to describe him as a “hyperdialectician” reveal more about their authors’ lack of humor than about Anselm’s sense of a joke. Yet the joke, in the Rhetorimachia, again has a point. Through a parody of syllogistic reasoning, its author casts doubt on his critics’ ability to distinguish between the hypothetical and the real. The falseness of factitious opposites is revealed in his misuse of dialectic, and the rhetorician commends himself to his patron by the dexterity of his sleights-of-hand. If others tax him with being a rootless sophist, he has a reply. In the fourth chapter of the second book, the muses of the trivium appear in a scene comically reminiscent of the opening of Boethius’s Philosophiae Consolatio. “Who else knows how to distinguish probability from sophistry or sophistry from necessity?” they ask. “Such is the force of syllogisms that . . . after you, there will be no one like you, except you, although it is impossible for anyone to become you. Therefore it is necessary not to be like you because, if it is impossible to be so, it is necessary not to be so; and, it being impossible, it follows that it is necessarily not so.”120 Idem vero ipse et iam non alter ipse: the identity of Anselm is not in doubt. Nor is his uniqueness, for he alone can show how rhetorical sophistry produces autopanegyric. Woe betide those who censure him for the worldliness of his culture! Maior pars civilis scientiae, it places him where he belongs—between two worlds. The saints vie with the muses for Anselm’s favors, and he avoids making the painful decision between religious and profane learning by waking from the dream in which it is presented. Reality, for Anselm of Besate, does not consist in “either/or.” The alternatives of the reformers evaded, ambiguity conﬁrms his freedom of choice. Choice, informed and competent, implies a hierarchy of values. Above the competition of the “trivial” disciplines, their weaknesses revealed by his spoof of syllogistic reasoning, Anselm sets the bonus orator of Cicero’s ideal.121 Immovable amid the shifting sands of reversible argument, only the vir bonus dicendi peritus is able to distinguish between appearance and truth. Vulgar manipulators of superstition—charlatans and magicians with their cheap alternatives to the intellectual art of rhetoric122 —are laughed out of court. In it remains the pillar of virtue who preserved his chastity at 120 “Cui tanta vis in syllogismis erit, cui tanta potestas probandi vel inprobandi quidvis? Post te quidem nullus erit ut tu, nisi qui fuerit tu, tu autem aliquem inpossibile est ﬁeri. Ut tu igitur necesse est non ﬁeri, quia, si inpossibile est esse, necesse est non esse: est autem inpossibile, necesse igitur non esse.” Rhetorimachia, pp. 147– 48. 121 Ibid., p. 162. 122 Cf. K. Manitius, “Magie und Rhetorik bei Anselm von Besate,” DA 12 (1956), pp. 52–72, and J. Ward, “Magic and Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” Rhetorica 6 (1988), pp. 57–118.

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Milan, the apologist of clerical marriage who believed in liberum arbitrium. Others took a different view. In the eyes of his enemies, Anselm of Besate merely sat on the fence; and this exploiter of contradictions ended as the victim of his own. Anselm, in his dedication to Drogo, recalls being branded as a heretic while he was writing the Rhetorimachia. In retreat from the public life natural to a teacher of the maior pars scientiae civilis, he found no peace from the accusations of plagiarism he was attempting to escape. The slander of malicious detractors was made worse by the gossip of the naive commoners (popularis simplicitas). Knowing nothing of Anselm’s subject and understanding less of his lifestyle, they realized that he could not be a hermit and “murmured” that he must be “diabolical.”123 The misinterpreted anchorite of learning (a ﬁgure familiar from classical and patristic literature) casts light on a charge that, in the eleventh century, has seemed obscure.124 A heretic, as Anselm of Besate recounts (or mocks) the popular view, was not a cleric who had committed matrimony but an intellectual practicing the trivium out of context. Where then was the right place for an advocate of the verbal arts? No longer in Milan, at the cathedral of which the scholasticus had ranked immediately after the archbishop since the beginning of the century.125 In the imperial chapel, staging-post to an episcopal throne, was Anselm’s probable answer, making a virtue of a necessity that he had contributed to create. Mistrusted by the common folk and attacked by his peers, this man of letters offers valuable testimony to a period style. Suspicion was in the air. Polemic was prevalent. If Anselm wished to show how an orator could manipulate both in a manner useful to a patron, that involved denigration of his rivals. He was no rhetor, offering verbiage to the people. Nor was he a grammarian, whose low level of intelligence he equated with the dimness of the plebs.126 Yet the critic of these “trivial” subjects also described himself as the favorite of their muses, and Anselm’s aspersions on his competi123 “Et sunt quibus est dicere in eodem hoc opere alieno quam meo sufragio laborasse, sicque opus nostrum tandem inscribi meum. Pro qua tollenda suspicione etsi nil profeci, desertum quoddam quasi heremum mihi elegi. Ubi dum operi huic studui, cum feris quam cum hominibus degi. Unde quadam populari simplicitate heresis ferme macula debui notari. Illius enim homines loci, ante meum tempus huiusmodi inscii negocii, meam solitariam cum perceperunt vitam, dum norunt non heremiticam murmurarunt demoniacam.” Rhetorimachia, p. 104. 124 Cf. H. Fichtenau, Ketzer und Professoren. Häresie und Vernunftglaube im Hochmittelalter (Munich, 1992), pp. 17– 53, and M. Blöckler, “Zur Häresie im 11. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 72 (1978), pp. 193 –234. 125 C. Violante, La Società milanese nell’ età precommunale (Bari, 1953), p. 189. 126 Rhetorimachia, pp. 120 and 121.

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tors bear more than a passing resemblance to the invectives against the trivium written by Peter Damian.127 Opposite extremes of a common culture, both of them drew on its resources. As William of Conches would later observe, the functions of the grammarian and the dialectician were often performed by the same person,128 not only in the schools. Outside them, in the wider debate about reform and investiture, each side in the dispute—papal or imperial, monastic or secular—launched similar accusations and employed comparable methods.129 Behind the ﬁction of a contest between the dialectici and their enemies lay the reality of what, in the Italian Quattrocento, was to be called the disputa delle arti.130 Conducted between militant but inseparable parts of the res publica litterarum, this conﬂict turned on ideas of unity, of limits, and therefore control. Deviance from norms still being established was an intellectual offense with ecclesiological consequences. The church, to which the writer belonged, owed his education, and (often) his sustenance, sought continuity amid reform which it found by branding dissidence with the traditional term of heresy. And the heresy of the trivium, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was a charge regularly made by those vulnerable to the same stigma. On the wings of the stage where Anselm of Besate played Mr. Hyde to Peter Damian’s Dr. Jekyll, these two celebrities were supported by a cast of minor but talented doubles. One of them was Manegold of Lautenbach, modernorum magister magistrorum.131 The zeal of the convert lies behind Manegold’s fulminations against the misuse of dialectic in his Liber contra Wolfelmum of 1086.132 Attacking the excesses of the philosophi in their dealings with questions of the faith, this repentant teacher of philosophy drew on the example of Peter Damian to attack his former self.133 Employing polemic against an opponent to castigate the errors of which he had once been guilty, Manegold foreshad127

See above, pp. 28ff. In his gloss on Priscian: “Gramaticus enim et dialecticus diversa sunt, quia habent diversas difﬁnitiones, et tamen idem multomciens est dial[ecticus] et gramaticus.” Lectio philosophorum, ed. E. Jeauneau (Amsterdam, 1973), p. 361. Cf. K. Fredborg, “The Unity of the Trivium,” in Geschichte der Sprachtheorie, 3: Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, ed. S. Ebbesen (Tübingen, 1995), pp. 325 – 38. 129 Cf. W. Hartmann, “Rhetorik und Dialektik in der Streitschriftenliteratur des 11./12. Jahrhunderts,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik, ed. Fried, pp. 73– 95. 130 Cf. E. Garin, La Disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento (Florence, 1947). 131 See W. Hartmann, “Manegold von Lautenbach und die Anfänge der Frühscholastik,” DA 26 (1971), pp. 47–149. 132 Hartmann, ed., MGH, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 8 (reprint Munich, 1991). 133 Hartmann, “Manegold,” pp. 112ff., 148. 128

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owed the strategy adopted in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon.134 Both of them, from different standpoints, reﬂected on the arts of interpretation. Both of them viewed misuse of the “trivial” disciplines as a sign of cultural malaise. And both of them wrote as accomplished rhetoricians. More scolarium, during a discussion about holy writ in the gardens of Lautenbach, Manegold and Wolfhelm join in debate at the beginning of the work.135 More scolarium rethorum that “Philistine grammarian,” Wenrich of Trier, is described as holding forth on any theme without regard to its content or character.136 What Manegold objected to was not the application of disputatio-method, but the failure to distinguish between “what has been done or not done” and “ﬁctive causae.” Superﬁcial eloquence and unnecessary argumentativeness—qualities that the Liber contra Wolfelmum displays in abundance—are the targets of his assault. But if grammarians and rhetoricians were marked by such failings, that did not mean that their subjects should be abolished. In his Liber ad Gebhardum, Manegold deplores those who “dissect the meaning of the text” without paying attention to its “lines and divisions, cola et commata, and details of context.”137 Contextual explanation, according to such rhetorical conventions and grammatical rules, is a property of the “learned and careful reader,” opposites of those indoctos et negligentes lectores against whom he inveighs. A concept of methodological propriety is developed in Manegold’s tract, for the critic of the trivium remains faithful to its techniques. What he, like Peter Damian before him, denounces is the preference for form—for “the din of words and the surface of the narrative”138 —over content. Such was the vice that, in a spirit of contentiousness shared by the Liber contra Wolfelmum with the writings it censures, led to the sin of heretica pravitas. How then was damnable heresy to be distinguished from pardonable error? The answer: when an author overstepped the mark and slighted papal authority—in particular the auctoritas of Gregory VII.139 Propriety is aligned with orthodoxy. It follows, according to the ecclesiology implied by Manegold’s hermeneutical criteria, that permissible ﬁnes of interpretation are to be set from outside. Within the discourse of scholarship, conventions can be observed and procedures followed, but truth is transcendent and revealed from above. To that superior power, mediated by the vicar of Saint Peter on earth, are subordinated the secular artes and profane scientia. That is why, while denying that he wishes to condemn the pagan philosophers, Mane134

See below, pp. 151ff. Liber contra Wolfelmum, p. 39. 136 Ibid., pp. 106 –7. 137 Cited by Hartmann, “Rhetorik und Dialektik,” pp. 87– 88. 138 Liber contra Wolfelmum, p. 40. 139 Ibid., p. 41. 135

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gold links their wanderings beyond the ﬁnes veritatis with German opposition to the papacy during the investiture crisis.140 Deviance, for him, is all of a piece: too much of a piece to avoid selfcontradiction, for the reformed scholar extolling ignorance over arrogance then proscribes a list of heathen thinkers—most of them known to him only by name141 —before going on to revile the poets, those “jongleurs at the wedding of idolatry.” They, who “deify wicked princes and brutal brigands with their din of bombastic words and meretricious epigrams devoid of all truth and purity,”142 should be despoiled like the Egyptians. The selective plundering recommended by Saint Augustine in his interpretation of the biblical text was too mild for this bellicose exegete. Manegold declares war, lusting after carnage and slaughter. On the ﬁeld he imagines after the battle between profane and sacred culture, all that will remain of the heathens are “corpses sprawled in nakedness.”143 Stripping the poets and the philosophers of their rhetorical excess, the Liber contra Wolfelmum surpasses previous polemic in its excessive rhetoric. Yet the sometime teacher of these subjects was aware of the paradoxes entailed by his own stance. Raising, without Peter Damian’s urbanity or humor, a difﬁculty inherent in his procedure, Manegold voiced a terrible doubt: “What if he, scourge of the philosophers, were to fall into the same error?”144 No defense was possible by appeal to the standards of scholarship, for he had divested it of independent validity. The solution, therefore, had to come from obedience to an auctoritas not his own and from humility before the quadratura Christiane doctrine. There, with his “prompt resolve to cut back any of his thoughts that exceeded the approved measure (norma),”145 this censor sought refuge from self-ﬂagellation. Kissing the rod of higher authority, Manegold of Lautenbach raised lasting issues that he left unresolved. The trivium was capable of producing appreciable achievements: subtle literature, stylish arguments, sophisticated thought. Yet it was practiced in a context that rendered its exponents vulnerable to attack. Retreat into the sheltered world of the cloister was the reaction of the author of the Ruodlieb, understandably apprehensive that his work—too worldly, too courtly, too unconventional for the reformers then enforcing their strict version of orthodoxy—would be rejected by a chorus of criticism. Those who took them on, like Anselm of Besate, might 140

Ibid., pp. 44– 47 and cf. pp. 98ff. Ibid., pp. 49ff. 142 Ibid., pp. 62– 63. 143 Ibid., p. 64. 144 Ibid., p. 101. 145 “Habemus quadraturam Christiane doctrine, quam intellectis et cognitis iuxta ponere debemus, et siquid de meditationibus nostris excesserit, ad normam illius festinato iudice resecare.” Ibid., p. 53. 141

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show that scholarship (or a parody of it) had a part to play in the investiture crisis, but neither satire nor polemic was capable of securing an erring ofﬁcial of the imperial chancery the promotion that he craved in the higher echelons of the church. The public roles of the writer-intellectual were dominated by those who professed themselves censors of litteratura, while employing its techniques. Grammatici, rhetorici, and dialectici, in the judgment of Manegold and Peter Damian before him, should know their place. Subordinate to the higher discipline of theology, the practitioners of such artes had no claim to self-sufﬁciency, nor any unity among themselves. Faced with authoritative detractors familiar with their methods and dismissive of their pretensions, they could not afford to stand alone, yet none of them was disposed to acknowledge the need for an alliance with the others. That was forced on them by the preference of later generations for logic and philosophy, and by arbiters of control whom Manegold failed to specify. For who was to determine the ﬁnes veritatis that he was determined to defend against transgressors like his former self? The pope? A council? A prelate? A leader of monastic reform? Or a modernorum magister magistrorum? Such were the questions that remained to be addressed in the next century; such the verborum pugnae waiting to be fought out by those intellectual thugs, Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux.146 146 On Abelard, Bernard, and Manegold, see Hartmann, “Manegold,” pp. 77ff. and pp. 108ff. See further below.

H

H

III TEACHING BY FIRE AND SWORD

J

OHN OF GARLAND, one of the ﬁrst Parisian masters appointed to the newly founded university of Toulouse (1229–31), was a man with a mission, celebrated in his De triumphis ecclesiae, a panegyric on persecution that described the “rooting out” of the Albigensian heretics “by teachers, by ﬁre, and by the sword.”1 If the juxtaposition was striking, the idea was not new. Scholarship and heresy had led a common life, at the center of debate, since the later eleventh century. Now mutually antagonistic, now uneasily conjoined, they stood in a complex symbiosis that the traditional contrast between ratio and auctoritas is too simple to encompass and too tired to bring to life. John of Garland witnessed an advanced stage in the long process during which the ecclesiastical hierarchy, after repeated struggles, obtained control of the teaching ofﬁce. Magisterium was the central point of a conﬂict that reached back from John’s generation to those of Abelard and his predecessors.2 Peter Abelard played a decisive role in this conﬂict—not, however, as the “free thinker” romanticism has made of him, nor as the “nonrealist” of a more recent school of thought. Abelard began his theological career as a denouncer of his teacher Roscelin. He continued it, with dialectical skill, by railing against the excesses of dialectic. His work in progress on theology was presented as a concerted campaign against heresy. Not only Saint Bernard, but also his alleged victim adopted the persona of the inquisitor. The procedures and attitudes of mind that led, in 1542, to the establishment of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition had begun to evolve during the High Middle Ages.3 The temerity of scholars such as

1 “. . . pravos extirpat et doctor et ignis et ensis.” De triumphis ecclesiae 5, 257, ed. T. Wright (London, 1856), p. 92. Cf. P. Classen, “Die ältesten Universitätsreform und Universitätsgründungen des Mittelalters,” in id., Studium und Gesellschaft, pp. 190 and 241, with M. Vicaire, “Le Role de l’université de Toulouse dans l’effacement du catharisme,” in L’Effacement du Catharisme (xiiie –xive siècles) (Toulouse, 1985), pp. 257–76, and Y. Dossat, “Les Premiers Maîtres à l’université de Toulouse: Jean de Garlande, Helinand,” in Les Universités du Languedoc au xiiie siècle (Toulouse, 1970), pp. 179 –203. 2 See above, pp. 3ff. 3 See W. Trusen, “Der Inquisitionsprozess. Seine historische Grundlagen und frühen Formen,” Savigny-Stiftung Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 74 (1988), pp. 168–230 and Die Anfänge der Inquisition im Mittelalter, ed. P. Segl (Cologne, 1993). For the Roman Inquisition see A. Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1997), pp. 35ff. and Chapter IX below.

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Abelard exercised twelfth-century champions of orthodoxy no less than the “popular” heresies of the same period which have attracted more attention.4 Without the sanction of his superiors and the advantages of a stable institution, this magister surrounded by disciples appeared to claim for himself an ofﬁce to which John of Garland, a century later, was appointed by a papal legate. Beyond the conﬁnes of the church, where Abelard’s unlicensed teaching was propagated, and in the papal curia, where he boasted of having well-placed supporters, the monk’s urge to instruct on questions of doctrine was regarded, by some, as a threat to the unity and discipline of the Romana ecclesia.5 The ambiguity of Abelard—a heretic, in the eyes of his enemies and, in his own, a defender of the faith—raises questions seldom posed and never answered by the many and admirable studies of his philosophy.6 They place his ideas at the center and relegate their ecclesiological implications to the margins, despite the efforts of this thinker, so often applauded for his originality, to assimilate his enterprise to a period style. Intended as tracts for the times, the successive versions of Abelard’s theology exposed tensions in the ecclesiastical culture of the High Middle Ages. Perceived as transgressive in doctrinal terms, Theologia “Summi boni” and its sequels were condemned according to the standards of his opponents in the twelfth-century church.7 Yet Abelard was not martyred by the attacks of Alberic of Reims, William of Saint-Thierry, or Bernard of Clairvaux. Lacking a precise technical vocabulary with which to censure him, they drew, in 1121 and 1140, on terms provided by him, to deﬁne heresy at his cost. For this inquisitor avant la lettre had knowingly entered into a competition for primacy initiated by Lanfranc and Anselm, Roscelin and Berengar. 4 M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992), p. 35. Cf. H. Grundmann, Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters, 3rd ed. (Göttingen, 1978); R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (London, 1977); and id., The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987). 5 For the concepts of unity and unanimity, see L. Moulin, “Sanior et maior pars. Note sur l’évolution des techniques électorales dans les ordres religieux du vie au xiiie siècle,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4th ser. 36 (1958), pp. 368 – 97, esp. 370 –75, and D. Kurze, “Häresie und Minderheit im Mittelalter,” in id., Klerus, Ketzer, Kriege und Propheten, Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. J. Sarnowsky (Warendorf, 1996), pp. 200ff. Cf. H. Furhmann, “Quod Catholicus non habeatur, qui non concordat Romanae ecclesiae. Randnotizen zum Dictatus Papae,” in Festschrift für H. Beumann (Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 263 – 87. 6 Classic is J. Jolivet, Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1982). Cf. recently C. Mews, Peter Abelard, Authors of the Middle Ages 5 (Aldershot, 1995), and J. Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard (New York, 1997). I have not seen M. T. Clanchy, Abelard. A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997). 7 Cf. in general R. Morghen, “Problèmes sur l’ origine de l’ hérésie au moyen âge,” in Hérésies et sociétés dans l’ Europe pré-industrielle (11e –18 e siècles), ed. J. Le Goff (Paris, 1968), p. 124: “Le problème ecclésiologique l’emporte . . . dans l’ hérésie du Moyen Age sur le problème purement théologique.”

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The doctrine of the eucharist, on which Berengar of Tours held unorthodox views, was no longer the issue by the ﬁrst quarter of the twelfth century.8 At stake was the claim of the theologian, as teacher and interpreter of holy writ, to determine the articles of the faith.9 Employing dialectical and grammatical methods, Berengar wrote about them with a polemic that provoked resistance. Not for nothing did the fathers at the Lateran council of 1079 insist that the heresiarch subscribe their eucharistic formula “in the sense in which they understood it, and not otherwise,”10 for two previous versions had failed to secure his assent.11 Lanfranc accused Berengar of pertinacia and misuse of patristic authorities, of sly evasiveness (versuta tergiversatio), of “twisting” evidence.12 Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida admonished him to preach, in plain language, the unvarnished truth and not to play the part of a “thousand shapes and forms.”13 Proteus found coherence in the role of the revisionist. No theologian of the eleventh century was more alert to the inexactitude of the charge of heresy, or more resolute in demonstrating its weaknesses, than the bloodyminded Berengar. His audacity led him to compose a tract (now lost) against the pope who, in 1050, had condemned him as a heretic;14 and his obduracy found fullest expression in his Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum, which likened the feud between himself and his critic to the conﬂict between David and Goliath.15 Berengar wrote that turgid but telling work in order to expose how the charges against him could be reversed.16 The church was not to be restricted to the fools who thronged it;17 a community of faith might de8 L. Hödl, “Die theologische Auseinandersetzung mit Berengar von Tours im frühscholastischen Eucharistietraktat De corpore domini,” in Auctoritas und ratio. Studien zu Berengar von Tours, ed. P. Ganz, Wolfenbüttler Mittelalterliche Studien 2 (Wiesbaden, 1990), pp. 69–88, esp. 73ff. 9 See pp. 11ff. above and cf. Hödl, “Articulus Fidei. Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Arbeit,” in Einsicht und Glaube, ed. J. Ratzinger and H. Fries (Freiburg, 1962), pp. 28 –76 and K. Becker, “Articulus ﬁdei. Von der Einführung des Wortes bis zu den drei Deﬁnitionen Philipps des Kanzlers,” Gregorianum 54 (1973), pp. 517– 69. 10 See R. W. Southern, “Lanfranc of Bec and Berengar of Tours,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to F. M. Powicke, ed. R. Hunt et al. (Oxford, 1948), pp. 27– 48. 11 R. Somerville, “The Case against Berengar of Tours—A New Text,” Studi Gregoriani 9 (1972), pp. 55–75, esp. 68 – 69. 12 Ed. R.B.C. Huygens in “Bérenger de Tours, Lanfranc, et Bernold de Constance,” Sacris Erudiri 16 (1965), pp. 370,15ff., 30f., and 33; see also p. 371,35. 13 K. Frank, ed., “Zur Charakteristik des Cardinals Humbert von Silva Candida,” Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 6 (1891), pp. 614,18 –22. 14 See H.E.J. Cowdrey, “The Papacy and the Berengarian Controversy,” in Auctoritas und Ratio, pp. 109–38, esp. 114. 15 Berengarius Turonensis Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum, ed. R.B.C. Huygens, CCCM 84 (Turnhout, 1988), p. 39,161ff. 16 Ibid., p. 41,210 –15. 17 Ibid., p. 41,234ff.

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generate into commonness of error.18 Numbers proved nothing, for the majority could be mistaken;19 and no one was above error, suspicion, or prejudice. Leo IX, pronouncing him a heretic, had spoken voce sacrilega.20 Who then determined the law perverted by this misguided pope? The bishops, of course—but they lacked the learning, insight, and piety of their predecessors.21 Berengar had been censured by a conspiracy of boneheads, incapable of discerning the mutability of opinion, the changeableness of language, the uncertainty of a position taken out of context.22 Contextual interpretation was essential in perceiving the difference between tolerable mistakes and fatal errors, for intellectual leadership depended on the ability to draw such distinctions. In the present decadence, where the blind led the blind,23 inﬂuence was monopolized by incompetents, sophists, and madmen.24 They were to grasp that the disputable authority of the orthodox stood in a dialectical relationship to that of the purported heretic. The accused mounting his defense by means of an accusation set out to prove, in his pertinacia, that discourse about heresy was malleable and manipulable. And although Berengar was defeated on the speciﬁc issue of the eucharist, he exercised a lasting inﬂuence on the wider terms of theological debate.25 Both by the trenchancy of his invective, which represented all who criticized him as idiots or ignoramuses, and by his skill at exploiting the ambiguities of internal evidence, he precluded resolution of the hermeneutic problem in its own terms and forced interpretative control to be imposed from the outside. The outside entailed not only a sacrilegious pope or a dubious council but also allies whom Berengar sought to win to his cause. Such was the position in which he put Lanfranc. Such, a handful of years later, was the invidious role in which Anselm was cast by Roscelin.26 Anselm was concerned to preserve his reputation. The successive drafts of his De incarnatione verbi, written or revised before and after his election to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1093,27 mark his distance from the 18

Ibid., p. 43,287– 88. Ibid., p. 44,327–28. 20 Ibid., pp. 46,390ff. and 47,405ff. 21 Ibid., p. 51,564 and 57,777. 22 Ibid., p. 56,726ff. and 58,807ff. 23 Ibid., p. 62,935ff. and 66,1092ff. 24 Ibid., p. 87,1836ff. and 95,2145ff. 25 On Berengar’s inﬂuence see G. Macy, “Berengar’s Legacy as Heresiarch,” in Auctoritas und Ratio, pp. 47– 67. 26 Cf. R. W. Southern, St. Anselm. A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1991), p. 177. 27 See C. J. Mews, “St. Anselm and Roscelin: Some New Texts and their Implications I. The De incarnatione verbi and the Disputatio inter christianum et gentilem,” AHDLM 66 (1991), pp. 55–98. 19

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heretical teacher Roscelin, who had taken his name in vain. An early version of the work was intended as an encyclical for a council to be held in Soissons;28 the last was addressed to Urban II.29 Marked by their defensiveness, both expressed Anselm’s concern for the authenticity and completeness of De incarnatione verbi. An unﬁnished version of his argument against Roscelin’s errors had been copied and circulated without his knowledge, he explained to the pope.30 Imperfecta, quod . . . perfectum requiratur: the repetition within a single sentence, untypical of so careful a stylist, indicates the measure of Anselm’s anxiety. Wishing to provide a version expressive of his ﬁnal views, he submitted his work to censura praevia.31 His superior thus enlisted on his side, Anselm was free to equate dialecticians with heretics.32 No less dialectical than the method he impugned was the one that he employed. Resentful of misrepresentation and fearful of its consequences, the subtle saint cast himself as the defendant before launching the prosecution. Presenting his own work for correction, Anselm invited renewed condemnation of Roscelin’s. Humility preserved the order of the hierarchy, and the ranks of the establishment were seen to close behind its champion as the heretic, with his unbidden opinions, was excluded. Exclusion lay at the heart of the problem and, conversely, a wish to belong to the elect who pronounced on the articles of the faith. If, in matters of censorship, De incarnatione verbi did not introduce a novel practice, Anselm’s work bound the issues of control and magisterium to one another with renewed rigor; and it set an example that Abelard was to follow. Denouncing Roscelin to the bishop of Paris c. 1118, Abelard imitated Anselm. With a zeal contrived to draw attention to himself, Abelard’s Ep. 1433 recalled a condemnation that lay more than two decades in the past, as though it were of present and burning interest.34 Calumny was one of his alleged motives—the insults directed by Roscelin at his work on the trinity—in order to establish a parallel between Abelard’s mistreatment and that of Anselm. No matter that Roscelin’s only recorded calumnia against 28 A. Wilmart, “Le Premier Ouvrage de saint Anselme contre le trithéisme de Roscelin,” Revue de théologie ancienne et médiévale 3 (1931), pp. 20 –21 and Sancti Anselmi Opera 1, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Seekan, 1938), pp. 281– 90. 29 Sancti Anselmi Opera 2, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Rome, 1940), pp. 1–17. 30 Ibid., p. 4,9–18. 31 Ibid., p. 3,7ff. 32 Ibid., p. 9,20ff. 33 Letters IX–XIV, ed. Smits, pp. 279 – 80. 34 On the date (c. 1118 –20) of Ep. 14, see Smits in ibid., p. 191ff. and C. Mews, “On Dating the Works of Peter Abelard,” AHDLM 52 (1985), pp. 73 –134, esp. 130 – 31.

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the saint had consisted in an effort to enlist his authority or that the attempt was brusquely repulsed. This was grist to Abelard’s mill, which promptly churned out Anselm’s identiﬁcation of “pseudo-dialecticians” with “pseudo-Christians.” The antithesis between them, as typiﬁed by the erring Roscelin on the one hand, and true believers like himself and his model on the other, was intended to suggest Abelard’s distance from methods of argument to which his own stood in perilous proximity.35 Polemic furnished Abelard with a context, a method, and a target. Less the use of dialectic than its misapplication had long been censured,36 and Ep. 14, like Ep. 13,37 brought back to the fore an issue that had loomed large in the controversies about Berengar. Leadership, for Abelard, was the nub of the matter: the function performed by “doctors of the church.” That is why, in Ep. 14, he emphasizes that Anselm, like himself, had suffered injury at the hands of the heresiarch. Pleading self-defense as his reason for attacking Roscelin, Abelard was making his debut as a heretic hunter. Repudiating his suspect teacher (never mentioned in the Historia calamitatum), this gifted student and thankless pupil was then free to assume the mantle of an orthodox master. Roscelin, understanding the thrust of Abelard’s argument, both stated and covert, set out to take him down a peg.38 If pertinacia was a cardinal attribute of heresy, Roscelin pleaded against total condemnation of those who repented their mistakes and for the permissibility of error. In his reinterpretation of the charge on which he had been convicted, he read Abelard a long lesson on tolerance by the fathers of the church, parading the names of authorities whom his opponent had cited, before launching into assassination of his character. Satire, already present in Berengar’s bombast, now became an integral part of medieval discussion of heresy. Yet the personal attack was not simply gratuitous: identifying Abelard’s works with the character that produced them, Roscelin described their author as “neither a cleric nor a lay35 Ep. 14, 38– 39, ed. Smits, p. 280. Cf. J. Jolivet, “Trois variations sur l’universel et l’individu: Roscelin, Abélard, Gilbert de la Porrée,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (1992), pp. 111–55, and Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, pp. 108ff. 36 Cf. W. Hartmann, “Rhetorik und Dialektik in der Streitschriftenliteratur des 11/12 Jahrhunderts,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik in früheren und hohen Mittelalter, ed. J. Fried. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 27 (Munich, 1966), pp. 133 – 50. 37 Smits, ed., pp. 271–77 with Jolivet, Arts du langage, pp. 269ff. and cf. Abelard’s Tractatus II de categoricis, ed. L. M. de Rijk, Petrus Abaelardus. Dialectica, 2nd ed. (Assen, 1970), pp. 145,31–3–146,1–2: “Item quae ab eis summatim designata sunt vel penitus omissa, labor noster in lucem proferat, interdum et quorumdam male dicta corrigat, et schismaticas expositiones contemporaneorum nostro[rum] uniat, et dissensiones modernorum, si tantum audeam proﬁteri negotium, dissolvat.” 38 J. Reiners, ed., Der Nominalismus in der Frühscholastik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Universalienfrage im Mittelalter (Münster, 1910), pp. 62– 80.

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man nor a monk.” Since no name could be found to call his enemy, this in voce logician espoused a mock-nominalism of invective.39 Against the view that there is no thing which is not a particular, he adduced the example of Abelard. With a vicious but effective wordplay on nomina of the masculine and neuter genders, Roscelin derived his student’s ambiguity from his castration and illustrated his incompleteness by the same example of a house that, in Abelard’s Dialectica, had been used to declare himself insane.40 The parody culminated in a stinging pun on Petrus imperfectus, worthy only of an opus imperfectum, echoing the motive given by Anselm for his anxiety about the unﬁnished version of De incarnatione verbi.41 Subverting the source on which Abelard had attempted to found his authority, Roscelin pilloried his method in order to question his identity. Who was this hybrid—undeﬁnable in role, dubious in mores, and indeterminate in sex—to lay down the law on doctrinal matters? The question, raised with satirical verve c. 1118 –20, was to be answered in the same spirit by Bernard of Clairvaux twenty years later. During that period, the successive versions of Abelard’s theology addressed the same problem.42 The ﬁrst, Theologia “Summi boni,”43 developed a double strategy, adumbrated in Ep. 14. Again, Abelard deﬁned his own position in terms of a struggle against heresy, not only that of Roscelin. Impugned by the target of his previous attack, his competence was derived from the difﬁculties posed by the biblical text, which only a trained philosopher was capable of fathoming. And against the suspicion surrounding the philosophy derived from pagan sources that he planned to adapt, Abelard cited an unassailable precedent. Augustine, in his writings (authentic or ascribed), both justiﬁed the use of heathen thinkers44 and presented grounds for regarding scripture as involucrum.45 39

Ibid., p. 80,8 – 9. For the term, see Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, pp. 108ff. Dialectica, pp. 554,37– 555,19 with E.H.W. Kluge, “Roscelin and the Medieval Problem of Universals,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 14 (1976), pp. 405 –14. 41 Reiners, ed., Der Nominalismus, p. 80,10 –26. 42 For a different view, see M. T. Clanchy, “Abelard’s Mockery of St. Anselm,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990), pp. 1–23. Cf. D. Luscombe, “St. Anselm and Abelard,” Anselm Studies 1 (1983), pp. 207–29. 43 All references are to the edition of E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3, CCCM 13 (Turnhout, 1987), pp. 39 –201. Useful introduction and notes, with German translation, by U. Niggli, Peter Abaelard. Theologia Summi boni. Tractatus de unitate et trinitate divina. Abhandlung über die Göttliche Einheit und Dreieinigkeit (Hamburg, 1989) and, with French translation, by J. Jolivet, Abélard, Du bien suprême (Theologia Summi boni) (Paris, 1978). 44 Cf. Theologia “Summi boni” 1, 35, pp. 98– 99 and see further below. 45 Ibid., pp. 99ff. with P. von Moos, “Was galt im lateinischen Mittelalter als das Literarische an der Literatur? Eine theologisch-rhetorische Antwort des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Literarische Interessenbildung im Mittelater, DFG Symposion 1991, ed. J. Heinzle (Stuttgart, 1992), p. 431–51 and E. Jeauneau, “L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses 40

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The notion of fruitful obscurity—of the darkness and difﬁculty inherent in holy writ—as a challenge to its exegete’s ability to approximate to the ineffability of God is linked, in the Theologia “Summi boni” and in the works that followed it, to an ideal of exclusive scholarship. The common herd, in the words of Macrobius,46 was to be shut out from learned discourse. “Open and naked exposition,” alien to theological study, amounted to a profanation of the sacred mysteries of the faith. The interpreter was a hierophant, under whose guidance the elect might accede to truths from which the ignorant and unworthy should be secluded. Images of initiation ﬁnd their corollary in anathema and abomination. Heresy was therefore to be deﬁned by the expert—not because he aspired to be an arbiter of orthodoxy, but because he was constrained to take a stand. Such was the position, ﬁrst assumed in the controversy with Roscelin, that Abelard would assert in all his subsequent writings on theology. Correction, not criticism, was the declared motive;47 and this rhetoric has been taken literally, despite its odor of mauvaise foi. The struggle for theological authority, during the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century, was conducted in an atmosphere of anxiety; and no one contributed more to that uncertain climate than Abelard, masking his provocations as selfdefense. The use of philosophical reasoning was justiﬁed because it had been employed against him, argued the youthful aggressor depicted in the Historia calamitatum. The military metaphors used there by this intellectual from a knightly background indicated ambitions to dominate a territory that had not yet been charted.48 Paris, Melun, Corbeil: the shifting locations of Abelard’s schools reﬂected tactics that found no permanent basis during the early part of his career as magister. Nor did he ﬁnd stability as a monk. Cast out (as he saw it) from Saint-Denis, expelled from the Paraclete, and a failure at Saint-Gildas, this peripatetic of scholarship developed an anti-institutional cast of thought. Emphasizing the inherent logic of his position, Abelard sought in self-consistency a refuge denied him by those whom he viewed as rivals, enemies, and persecutors. Mistrust prevailing about the techniques he applied to theology, he aimed to show that, if some dialecticians were misguided and certain philosophers mistaken, he was capable of demonstrating the validity of studies that they had brought into disrepute.49 This led Abelard to reﬁne

de Guillaume de Conches,” in id., Lectio Philosophorum. Recherches sur l’Ecole de Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973), pp. 125 – 92. Cf. P. Dronke, Fabula. Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden, 1985), pp. 62ff. 46 Theologia “Summi boni,” 1, 41– 43, pp. 100 –101. 47 E.g., ibid., 3, 75, p. 189. 48 Southern, Scholastic Humanism, p. 204. 49 Theologia “Summi boni,” 3, 101, p. 201, and cf. n. 38 above.

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the crude clichés of abuse that had been directed at the dialectici. Less the subject itself than the competence of its practitioners was questionable, and the answer lay in the correct use of methods by which (as the Peripatetics attested) errors could be eliminated and the simplices defended.50 Thus styling himself an antidialectical dialectician, Abelard, in a simile borrowed from Berengar which Bernard was to turn against him, compared his struggle against argumentorum importunitas with the conﬂict between David and Goliath.51 The likeness was intended to be heroic, and its intention was to present him as both the mentor and the judge of an erring philosophical elite: “Let those who claim to be philosophers at least attend to philosophical advice. Let them listen to their masters. . . .”52 Brushing aside less capable thinkers, Abelard placed himself at the heart of an inner circle capable of penetrating the arcane involucra of scripture, from which the ill-informed and the ill-willed were excluded. If they failed to understand his message, that was attributable to their limitations. The hermeneutics of Theologia “Summi boni” might be mediated to a receptive audience, but they were to be practiced only by the elect. Among the elect, others were inclined to think, they themselves ought to be counted. There was substance in Abelard’s imputation of invidia to the detractors which his position created, for it was not difﬁcult to perceive the claim to primacy that lay behind his criticisms. Opposed to dialecticians, philosophers, and heretics, while drawing on their arguments, he aroused the suspicion that he intended to allay. Seeking to ward off charges that he was swift to level against others, Abelard failed to recognize that accusations of heresy were becoming two-edged weapons prone to fall on those who wished to brandish them. Envy at his popularity among students and rivalry between different schools of thought do not wholly account for the condemnation of Theologia “Summi boni” that followed, in short order, at Soissons. The magistri of the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century were competing for more than their pupils’ fees and applause, as the Historia calamitatum attests. There Abelard describes himself, after his castration in 1118 and entry into Saint-Denis, as a “philosopher rather of God than of the world,” who sought to combine theology with dialectic—reasons similar to those for which he had questioned the vocation and doubted the motives of his other teacher, William of Champeaux, when he became a regular canon.53 Pur50

Ibid., 2,5, p. 116,58ff. and 2,13, p. 119,128 –29. Ibid., 2,25, p. 122,222ff. 52 Ibid., 2,20, p. 120,160ff. 53 Historia calamitatum, ed. J. Monfrin, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1967), pp. 81– 82,653 – 89. For William cf. ibid., pp. 65, 76– 82 (and note the similarity of style). See J. Châtillon, Le Mouvement canonial au Moyen Age. Réforme de l’ Eglise, spiritualité et culture, ed. P. Sicard (Paris, 51

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sued by students, Abelard “fabricated” a metaphorical “ﬁshnet.” Its bait was the savor of philosophy; its purpose to draw his pupils to “true philosophy.” The model cited was that of Origen who combined, in supreme measure, the virtues at present attributed to monks and assigned, in pagan antiquity, to philosophers.54 A synthesis was thus sought between mundana and vera sapientia—between Abelard’s former profession in the schools with his new professio in the monastery—by combining “both types of teaching” (ex utraque lectione scole nostre). His critics objected that a monk should not waste time on secular learning and that, although himself sine magistro, Abelard presumed to give theological instruction.55 A conﬂict ensued, which they sought to resolve by mobilizing the ecclesiastical hierarchy. So Abelard viewed the causes of his debacle at Soissons, casting himself as the victim of his own success, as the target of professional enmity, as a well-meaning innocent.56 The innocence is undercut by his own analogies. Acknowledging that the study of scripture “was more appropriate to my [monastic] professio,” the apostle-hero of the Historia calamitatum likened himself to a ﬁsher of men. Matthew 4:19 and Mark 1:17 lay behind his simile, while the “evil net” and “evil times” of Ecclesiastes 9:12 lent it an air of prophetic pessimism, which was justiﬁed. The terms used by Abelard to describe his pupils’ yearning for true, not verbal, understanding anticipated his attempts to fend off the attack launched by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1140.57 Submission of the Theologia “Summi boni” to the papal legate, Cardinal Cono of Praeneste, was of no avail; he referred the work to the archbishop of Reims and Abelard’s enemies, who employed delaying tactics. The result, according to the Historia calamitatum, was a crisis of authority. Into that vacuum stepped the defendant. He appealed to the public tribunal. “Each day before the council met, I set out, in publico omnibus, the Catholic faith as I had written about it.”58 The audacity of that phrase previews the grounds for Abelard’s condemnation at Sens.59 Having declared himself “ready to make corrections to, and amends for, what he had writ1992), p. 169. On William and Abelard see A. M. Piazzoni, Guglielmo di Saint-Thierry: Il Declino dell’ ideale monastico nel secolo xii (Rome, 1988), pp. 157ff. 54 Historia calamitatum, p. 77,493ff. 55 Cf. H. Santiago-Otero, “Pedro Abelardo y la ‘licentia docendi’,” in id., Fe y cultura en la edad media (Madrid, 1988), pp. 139 – 53. 56 Historia calamitatum, p. 82,676 – 89. 57 “. . . dicentes quidem verborum superﬂuam esse prolationem, quam intelligentia non sequeretur, nec credi posse aliquid nisi primitus intellectum.” Ibid., p. 83,696 – 98. Cf. Apologia contra Bernardum 8, ed. E. Buytaert, in Petri Abaelandi Opera Theologica 1 CCCM II (Turnhout, 1969), p. 363. 58 “Singulis diebus, antequam sederet concilium, in publico omnibus secundum quam scripseram ﬁdem catholicam disserebam.” Historia calamitatum, p. 84,739 – 42. 59 See below, pp. 101–2.

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faith,”60

ten or said, if it differed from the Catholic the accused, his offer declined by the legate, attempted to turn the tables. Universally admired for the clarity of his style (uerborum apertionem) and of his meaning, Abelard was applauded for the openness with which he spoke. Palam loquitur, declared the people in the words of the Jews who, at John 7:26, ominously add, “Do the rulers indeed know that this is the very Christ?” The same phrase recurs in Abelard’s Confessio ﬁdei “universis,” composed in reply to the list of his heresies issued by Bernard of Clairvaux.61 Openness, excessive and public, now became one of the charges on which Abelard, like his role model, was arraigned. In vain did he report the opinion, unanimously expressed by “the people and clergy” at Soissons, that his enemies should recognize that they were in the wrong; rashly he boasted of his success in luring Alberic of Reims into making the very error imputed to him.62 With his retort that rationes and auctoritates were of no weight in the case, Alberic demonstrated that he had understood better than Abelard what was at issue. When the well-disposed Geoffrey of Chartres warned against offending the famous teacher’s many “fans and supporters” (assentatores et fautores), his words were chosen with care. The bishop did not refer neutrally to Abelard’s pupils, to his followers, or to his school. He represented them as the adherents, by conviction or advantage, of a leader who “had crushed the fame of his masters and ours”—of an irresistible force of nature that, like the vine of Psalm 80, had sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river.63 This language, meant to impress, might also alarm.64 The biblical similes and Horatian quotations that the Historia calamitatum goes on to attribute to Geoffrey of Chartres, transposing Abelard’s case onto that metahistorical plane of heroism where he was disposed to set himself,65 reinforced his singularity. Singularity, overwhelming in the eyes of his admirers and intolerable in the opinion of his detractors, was the essence of the accusations against him, as he reports. When the bishop pleaded for the evidence to be heard and Abelard was given a chance to defend himself, his opponents replied that “the entire world” was incapable of with60

Historia calamitatum, pp. 83 – 84,726 – 31. “Palam locutus sum ad ediﬁcationem ﬁdei sive morum.” C. S. F. Burnett, ed., “Peter Abelard, Confessio ﬁdei ‘universis’: A Critical Edition of Abelard’s Reply to Accusations of Heresy,” MS 48 (1986), p. 133,12. 62 Historia calamitatum, pp. 84 – 85,745 – 81. 63 Ibid., p. 85,794 – 97. 64 Cf. the negative use, in 1140, of the same simile, in the letter by the French bishops to Innocent II as reported by Otto of Freising, Gesta Frederici 1, 51, ed. F.-J. Schmale, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 17, 2 ed. (Darmstadt, 1974), p. 228 and see further below, p. 102. 65 Historia calamitatum, pp. 85 – 86,801–22. 61

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standing the force of his sophistical arguments. Geoffrey cited the epistles of Jerome and the gospel of John; Abelard, appealing to canon law, was inclined to regard his trial as a torment leading to cruciﬁxion. Omnipotent in disputation, he was described—both by himself and by his adversaries— as a towering giant of thought. Messianic or monstrous, Abelard forgot that, on the ecclesiological view taken by others, he was no more or less than a monk. Obedience was his duty, independence his practice. Independence, to Abelard’s critics, meant presumption. An example should be made of him. Sine ulla inquisitione his book was condemned and burned “in the sight of all.” He, who had dared to teach “publicly” and to diffuse his work, unauthorized by the pope or the church,66 was to be humiliated publicly— made to recite the Athanasian creed “like any boy”67 and conﬁned to the abbey of Saint-Médard. For Abelard, this amounted to a demotion from the cathedra of a master to the puerile level of a catechist: for his judges, an allusion to Luke 18:17. To receive the kingdom of God, sicut puer, was a sign of humility. The giant should be cut down to size. Hence it was hardly to the point when Abelard sneered that the papal legate was “less learned than necessary”68 to assess the rights and wrongs of the case, or insinuated that Cono of Praeneste was reliant on an archbishop in the pocket of his enemies. “Publicly,” both in his lessons and before each sitting of the council, Abelard had circumvented the authorities of the church, in order to establish his own auctoritas. His own had no institutional status and was counter to the mounting current of opinion that led to the “prohibition . . . for monks or secular canons to teach Roman law or medicine and the Cistercian statute forbidding any member of the order to write a book without the permission of the general chapter.”69 Trespassing beyond the bounds being set by Christ’s modern apostles, Abelard had staked out his own sphere of enquiry. The truth of his teaching was less the issue than the magisterium that he asserted. Appealing to “the public” on grounds of his personal charisma, at Soissons he felt the force of its recoil. The cost of public success was, during the struggle for leadership Abelard aspired to win, public disgrace in the atmosphere that he had successfully poisoned. That theme resounds, at every stage of his career, through the writings of friends and enemies alike. Prior Fulk of Deuil, for example, in 66

Ibid., p. 87, 846 – 54. Ibid., p. 88,901– 3. 68 Ibid., p. 87,855 – 56. 69 Constable, Reformation, p. 215. Cf. J. Miethke, “Theologenprozesse in der ersten Phase ihrer institutionellen Ausbildung: die Verfahren gegen Peter Abelard und Gilbert von Poitiers,” Viator 6 (1975), pp. 87–116, esp. 94. 67

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1118 sent Abelard a letter of mock consolation intended to rub in the shame of his castration.70 The world had ﬂocked to the famous teacher in his hour of glory, begins this pseudo-panegyric: Rome, sometime source of learning, deferred to Abelard’s primacy by sending him students in droves, as did other regions of Europe, including Britanny (the former paragon’s patria), which entrusted to him its “animals.” Now, after the fall incurred by pride and promiscuity at variance with “our order and the rule of our religion,” everyone—from the bishops to the canons, clerics, laity and, particularly, the women—was united in grief at Abelard’s spectacular humiliation. To gloat over that scandal was not the only point of Fulk’s planctus. He took care to underline, in the manner of Roscelin, Abelard’s alienation from the monastic order to which he ofﬁcially belonged. Craving for fame coupled with immorality had placed the self-publicist beyond the pale of his order. Fulk’s image, accepted but varied by Abelard, became an important element in his self-depiction. Outcast, as the Historia calamitatum portrays his exit from Saint-Denis after a dispute about the identity of its patron saint, he made his way to Quincey, where he founded the oratory of the Paraclete. There too he was hounded—this time by those “new apostles,” Norbert of Xanten and Bernard of Clairvaux.71 The reason why has not been explained. A motive is suggested by Hilary of Orléans, Abelard’s pupil, who wrote a lament on the dissolution of the community that his teacher had gathered about him.72 The collapse of the Paraclete was attributed by Hilary to a “detestable peasant.” In terms reminiscent of the ideal of learning that Theologia “Summi boni” had described, “the school” formed by Abelard’s clerical followers was profaned by this rustic outsider whom Hilary derided as a publicus.73 Evoking the magnetism exercised by his master, Hilary revealed the full ambiguity of the word public, in both its positive and its negative senses, when he declared that students like himself had ﬂocked to Abelard “passim et publice.”74 The draw of the famous teacher, which grounded his title to 70 PL 178, 371B-376B with D. van den Eynde, “Détails biographiques sur Pierre Abélard,” Antonianum 38 (1963), pp. 217–23, esp. 219, and D. Luscombe, “From Paris to the Paraclete: The Correspondence of Abelard and Héloise,” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), pp. 247– 83, esp. 255f.; followed by Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, pp. 13–15. 71 For the controversy over the identity of these “apostles,” see J. Miethke, “Abelards Stellung zur kirchenreform. Eine biographische Studie,” Francia 1 (1973), pp. 167– 69 and the bibliography summarized by Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 20 and n. 48. 72 Carm. 6, ed. W. Bulst and M. L. Bulst-Thiele, Hilarii Aurelianensis versus et ludi. Epistolaeludus Danielis Belouacensis (Leiden, 1989), pp. 30 – 31. For the date, see ibid., p. 15. 73 “Detestandus est ille rusticus, / Per quem cessat a scola clericus: / Gravis dolor quod quidam publicus / Id effecit, ut cesset logicus.” Ibid., Carm. 6, 3, p. 30. 74 “Nos in unum passim et publice / Traxit aura torrentis logice. . . .” Ibid., 6, 9, p. 31.

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intellectual leadership, had again placed him beyond the limits set by those unwilling to accept even a modiﬁed version of his magisterial aspirations. A dependance of Saint-Denis may not have been one of the schools of Paris, nor was the quasi-monastic community of the Paraclete a full-ﬂedged scola, yet in both Abelard’s “public” appeal contained the seeds of its “public” destruction. His followers still wrote in the language, and thought in the terms, of 1121. Small wonder that, throughout the two decades that preceded his next condemnation, Soissons continued to haunt him. That experience and its consequences were in Abelard’s mind when he composed, at the Paraclete during the period 1122–25, the ﬁrst recension of Theologia christiana.75 The outcast now viewed himself as the persecuted: “God is my witness, never did I hear of any gathering of churchmen without believing that it was directed at my damnation.”76 Waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he expected to be dragged before “a council or a synagogue.” That equation is characteristic of the dialectic between perceived and real orthodoxy developed in the various versions of Abelard’s theology and in the Historia calamitatum. Likening himself to Athanasius, to whose creed he had been forced to subscribe at Soissons, he compared his tormentors to heretics and reported his desire to leave Christendom and live among nonbelievers. They, “the enemies of Christ,” would be less suspicious of him on account of his infamy, believing that it would make him likely to join their “sect.”77 Self-apology accentuating the tendency to inversion to which his thought was already prone, that word indicated Abelard’s ﬁdelity to the faith in the midst of despair. Hounded by the “new apostles,” he assumed the mentality of his adversaries which, in Theologia christiana and Theologia “scholarium,” he was never to discard. The apprehensiveness of the suspect now combined with the deﬁance of the misunderstood victim. Bent on proving his case, Abelard developed new argumentative strategies but gave no ground on his right to discuss the trinity that remained his principal subject. The same intellectual persona constructed in Theologia “Summi boni,” stating no less forcefully his theory of involucrum, reappears in the ﬁrst book of the Theologia christiana.78 What changes is the emphasis. Abelard now extols literal exegesis and condemns the twisting of the text in order to impose on it an arbitrary 75 E. M. Buytaert, ed., Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 2, CCCM 12 (Turnhout, 1969). On the date, see C. Mews, “Peter Abelard’s Theologia christiana and Theologia “scholarium” reexamined,” RTAM 53 (1986), pp. 109 – 58, esp. 152. 76 “Deus ipse mihi testis est, quotiens aliquem ecclesiasticarum personarum conventum adunari noveram, hoc in dampnationem meam agi credebam.” Historia calamitatum, p. 97,1213–15. 77 Ibid., p. 97,1215 –26; p. 98,1228 –29. 78 Theologia christiana, pp. 112ff.

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meaning with a stringency motivated by his experience at Soissons.79 Jerome, with whom he increasingly identiﬁed himself,80 was adduced to justify his use of the heretic Origen81 in a procedure that, with inadvertent irony, recalled Roscelin’s arguments against condemning those found guilty of pardonable mistakes. If a premise, unspoken but plain, of Abelard’s work in the 1120s had become mistrust, he went on to elevate it to a principle of doubt. “Doubting we come to inquire; with inquiry we perceive the truth.” This famous sentence from the prologue to Sic et non82 afﬁrmed the wish to preserve that margin of freedom that enabled errors to be admitted. Such admissibility, he argued, was both essential to the evolution of doctrine and sanctioned by the fathers of the church. In Sic et non, as in Theologia christiana, Jerome was again Abelard’s chief authority for rejecting the dogmatism that arose from a blind belief in auctoritates. Because they could be shown to be discrepant or contradictory,83 tradition might be turned against itself. No dead weight but living and fallible, it stood in constant need of discrimination. Yet even if the apostle Paul had on occasion to be charged with untruth84 and Saint Augustine had observed that lies might serve a purpose (ofﬁciosa mendacia),85 there were limits. That is why, balancing his manifesto of critical enquiry, Abelard cited a list of libri authentici from the Decretum of pseudo-Gelasius.86 The borders of orthodoxy, in Sic et non and the theological works, were to be defended by the bulwarks of a canon. In this delicate equilibrium between liberty and control, the balance was to be held by an intellectual censor. Redeﬁning the role Soissons had stripped from him, Abelard varied his position that the methods of heretics should be turned against them.87 Correction was not merely to serve as a warning to deviants; it should also enable them to understand the reasons 79

Ibid., 1, 117, pp. 121,1546—122,1569. See C. Mews, “Un lecteur de saint Jérôme au xiie siècle: Pierre Abélard,” in Jérome entre l’Occident et l’Orient, ed. J.-Y. Duval (Paris, 1988), pp. 429– 44. 81 Theologia christiana 2, 5, p. 134,82ff. 82 Ed. B. Boyer and R. McKeon, Peter Abelard, Sic et Non (Chicago, 1976), p. 103,338 – 39. See below, p. 348. 83 “Beatus quoque Hieronymus, cum inter ecclesiasticos doctores quosdam ceteris anteferret, ita nobis legendos esse consuluit, ut eos magis diiudicemus quam sequamur. . . . Idem in Psalmo LXXXV quasi auctoritatem his omnibus, ait. . . . Quamvis ergo sanctus sit aliquis post apostolos, quamvis dissertus sit, non habeat auctoritatem. . . . Non enim praeiudicata doctoris opinio sed doctrinae ratio ponderanda est.” Ibid., pp. 102,305—103,325 with J. Jolivet, “Le traitement des autorités contraires selon le Sic et non d’Abélard,” in id., Aspects de la pensée médiévale. Abélard. Doctrines du langage (Paris, 1987), pp. 79 – 92. 84 Sic et non, p. 99,244ff. 85 Ibid., p. 101,296. 86 Ibid., pp. 105–12. Cf. above, p. 13 and n. 47. 87 Theologia christiana, 2, 10 –11, p. 137,170 – 94. Cf. Theologia “Summi boni,” 3, 101, p. 201. 80

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why mistakes were made and how they could be avoided.88 Condemned rather for the form and effect of his teaching than for its substance, he reacted by laying stress on content: on the judgment of an argument in terms faithful to those in which it had been couched. Fidelity to positions sweepingly impugned enabled their speciﬁc kernel of truth to be preserved, as the pagan philosophers illustrated. Onto them Abelard projected his own cause. Like him, they had been written off by the narrowly orthodox, although (again like him) they had achieved insights from which the less blinkered could learn, if they accepted that errors might be judged critically without writing off a peccant or imperfect thinker. Just as Sic et non sets out to illustrate how conﬂicts might be resolved in the interpretative space left open by divergent testimonies, so Theologia christiana aims to show how dogmatism can be avoided by reshaping tradition. Opening its boundaries to include what might be saved from the thought of redeemable heretics and virtuous heathens, Abelard insisted on the necessity to distinguish where others preferred to damn. His defense, launched at the point where assault had been most sweeping,89 aimed to regain for the philosophi what had been refused to himself in 1121. Yet in the anxiety to which Historia calamitatum attests, such likenesses were not to be pressed. Testimonies from the pagans are cited in the Theologia christiana, because—alleges Abelard—he had them from Augustine.90 Justifying his procedure by alleging the ignorance on which he had once poured scorn, their nervous champion claimed to know these suspect thinkers only at second hand. At ﬁrst hand Abelard had felt the consequences of his attempt to explore one of the central doctrines of the faith being prohibited by the hierarchy to which his detractors had appealed. In the precariousness of his position, ecclesiology was therefore a theme to be handled with caution. Here too the philosophers of antiquity were instructive, for they furnished Abelard with a counter-example—counter to the lip service paid to religion by those who called themselves Christians.91 True wisdom, genuine virtue, sincere faith, as practiced by them in the past, revealed the hollow pretense of monks and clerics in the present.92 Adherents to an ascetic ideal pursued in solitude,93 pagan thinkers offered a model of the hermetical life ignored 88

Theologia christiana, 2, 11, p. 137,187– 92. “Et quoniam inﬁdelitatis philosophos utpote gentiles arguunt, omnemque eis quasi damnatis per hoc ﬁdei auctoritatem adimunt, in hoc nostra plurimum intendat defensio, in quo tota eorum nititur impugnatio.” Ibid., 2, 14, p. 139,236– 40. 90 Ibid., 2, 12, p. 137,195 – 99. 91 Ibid., 2, 43, p. 149,585 – 606. 92 Ibid., 2, 45, p. 150,629 – 35. 93 Cf. Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, pp. 306f. with references. 89

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by their unworthy heirs. Boldly indicating the path from which his order had deviated, Abelard timidly skirted the issue of his right to do so, citing instead the authority of Plato. One feature of the Timaeus which he admired was its theory of social order.94 The Plato commended by Macrobius and Augustine did not teach that women and children should be kept in common; he expressed the fraternal spirit cultivated in a civil society,95 from which poets, enemies of the truth, should be expelled.96 A perfection not to be found in the cloister of Saint-Denis was sought by Abelard in his Platonic ideal of a refuge outside the monastic institutions where he had experienced rejection or imprisonment. To dubious ﬁgures of the establishment, such as complacent abbots neglectful of their duties,97 he intended to mete out the treatment that had been his own lot. And his reasoning, grounded in a source other than his own auctoritas,98 that the teaching, by word and deed, of virtuous pagans enabled Christians to be corrected99 had the advantage of supporting his argument for the spiritual usefulness of lay culture. The lessons of the philosophers could only be learned by those equipped to understand them; the liberal arts offered essential preparation for the study of scripture;100 grammarians were to be preferred to heretics;101 secular learning should therefore complement divinity in the formation of spirituales.102 Religio, asserted Abelard, was not enough. Impudence and arrogance tainting those who set themselves up as magistri, they should be admonished to change their life.103 The suspect had begun to re-emerge as the accuser, developing the intellectual elitism of his Theologia “Summi boni” into a critique of his rivals’ failings. Read with the eyes of a spiritualis, such as William of Saint-Thierry, or of an abbot, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Theologia christiana was liable to be regarded as a variant on positions condemned at Soissons. Distinguishing between the particular diction (singularia verba) appropriate to theological discourse and the “public,” “common,” or “vulgar” lan94 Theologia christiana 2, 51– 53, pp. 152– 54. On Abelard and Plato, see T. Gregory, “Abélard et Platon,” in Peter Abelard, Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain, May 10 –12, 1971, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Louvain, 1974), pp. 38 – 64. [⫽ id. Mundana sapientia, pp. 175–99] and L. Moonan, “Abelard’s use of the Timaeus,” AHDLM 56 (1989), pp. 7–90. 95 Theologia christiana 2, 46, pp. 150f. 96 Ibid., 2, 53 –54, pp. 153 – 54. 97 Ibid., 2, 5, p. 134,82ff. 98 Ibid., 2, 57, p. 155,797ff. and 2, 60, p. 156,823ff. 99 Ibid., 3, 33, p. 207,386ff. 100 Ibid., 2, 120, p. 187,1830ff. 101 Ibid., 2, 124, p. 189,1898. 102 Ibid. 3, 8a, p. 197. 103 Ibid., 3, 32, p. 207,380 – 85.

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guage capable only of traducing the ineffable that formed the object of his inquiry,104 Abelard proposed to answer fools according to their folly.105 If Anselm was not among their number, his analogy between the trinity and a watercourse might and should be questioned, for it lent itself to the heresy of viewing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as temporally distinct.106 Hypercorrectness compensating for uncertainty after 1121, the apologete for virtuous pagans contrived to suspect a Christian saint. This attitude (real or feigned) was justiﬁed by the circumstances, proclaimed Theologia christiana. Hung with dark clouds of menace, the last days had arrived and the coming of the Antichrist was imminent.107 Enemies needed to be identiﬁed in the catalogue of modern heretics drawn up in the fourth book (76–81),108 with special animus reserved for Alberic of Reims, Abelard’s accuser and Bernard’s protégé. That singularis magister branded as heretical anyone who disagreed with teaching that he conducted “publicly, in the schools.”109 Not by chance did Abelard employ the same terms used to condemn him at the “council” or “synagogue” of Soissons.110 His rightful place usurped by a rival, he sought to dislodge Alberic and his likes. In their wish to restrict doctrinal discussion and their failure to grasp the state of emergency that prevailed,111 these opponents were to be castigated by one who would protect the “less learned” from scandals.112 And who was he? A magisterial ﬁgure of singular authority “publicly” declaring that those who disagreed with him were heretical: the Abelard who, in Theologia christiana and its revisions, himself dictated the terms in which he was to be castigated by William of Saint-Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux.113 The reworking of Theologia christiana into Theologia “scholarium,”114 which ﬁnds a parallel in the long gestation of Sic et non, was accompanied by other experiments in which this restless refashioner of his views sought to ﬁnd a new and distinctive voice. Temporarily silenced at Soissons, Abelard ampliﬁed and varied the univocality of his earlier writings with a chorus of authorities. Harmony was sought after the discordant testi104

Ibid., 3, 133, p. 245,1623ff. Ibid., 3, 134, p. 245,1634ff. and 3, 135, p. 246,1642ff. 106 Ibid., 4, 83, p. 304,1206– 32 with Luscombe, “St. Anselm and Abelard,” pp. 212f. 107 Theologia christiana 4, 73, p. 298,1070ff. 108 Ibid., p. 300,1102– 303,1174. 109 Ibid., 4, 78, p. 301,1128f.; p. 302,1136 – 38. 110 See above, p. 72. 111 Theologia christiana 4, 81, p. 303,1171–74. 112 Ibid., 5, 17, p. 354,266 –79. 113 See below, pp. 98ff. 114 Cf. C. Mews, “The Development of the Theology of Peter Abelard,” in Petrus Abelardus (1079–1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung (Trier, 1980), pp. 153 – 98. 105

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monies had expressed their full contrariety, but that tendency to limited pluralism did not solve lasting problems. How was he, a peripatetic divided between an urge to magisterium and a wish to protect himself from the animosity aroused by his opinions, to lend them appropriate form and expression? An answer is offered in the Collationes.115 Both dialogues that make up this subtle work are dominated by the Philosopher, a debater more than equal to the Jew and generally a match for the Christian. Through the give-and-take of their exchange, conducted on principles of rational argument, Abelard illustrates the potential concord between Christian and pagan thought for which he argues in his theology. Moreover, the division of roles enabled him to address afresh questions that Soissons and its sequel continued to pose, the ﬁrst and most pressing of which was the nature of his own authority. Why, Abelard asks at the outset, had the disputants chosen him as their iudex?116 “Because,” the Philosopher replies, “as a thinker trained in the schools, I considered the divisions between the faiths and deemed the Jews foolish and the Christians insane. You, an expert in secular and sacred learning, a magister eminent above all others, have composed a wondrous work of theology that its persecutors can neither diminish nor destroy.”117 The self-advertisement, hardly tempered by the irony with which Abelard comments on these ﬂattering words,118 indicated a measure of deﬁance. No longer the leading master in the Parisian schools, perhaps not even the provincial logicus of the Paraclete, he represented himself, in this speech attributed to the central ﬁgure of his Collationes, as an irenic arbiter in religious conﬂict. The basis of that status was Abelard’s theological work condemned at Soissons. What Christians—obtuse, corrupt, or even heretical—failed to see is perceived by the philosopher of the Collationes who, with the insight ascribed to pagan thinkers in Theologia christiana, acknowledges the magisterium of his wronged creator. 115 R. Thomas, ed., Petrus Abaelardus. Dialogus inter Philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum (Stuttgart, 1970)—on which see G. Orlandi, “Per una nuova edizione del Dialogus di Abelardo,” Rivista critica di storia della ﬁlosoﬁa 24 (1979), pp. 474 – 94, and C. Trovò, Pietro Abelardo, Dialogo tra un ﬁlosofo, un giudeo, e un cristiano (Milan, 1992). See P. von Moos, “Abaelards Collationes oder “Gespräche eines Philosophen mit einem Juden und einem Christen,” in Interpretationen zu Hauptwerken der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. K. Flasch (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 36 – 45. On the dating to 1225/26– 31, see Mews, “On Dating,” pp. 104–26, and the opinion cited by Marenbon, Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 66n.44. For the interpretation cf. ibid., pp. 66f. and R. Thomas, Der philosophisch-theologische Erkenntnisweg Peter Abaelards im Dialogus inter Philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum (Bonn, 1966), and C. Mews, “Peter Abelard and the Enigma of Dialogue,” in Beyond the Persecuting Society, ed. J. W. Laursen and C. Nederman (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 53 –70. 116 Dialogus, p. 41,13f. 117 Ibid., pp. 41– 43,15 – 52. 118 Ibid., p. 42,40f.

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Conﬁrmed by such support and undaunted in the face of rejection, the alter ego of the ﬁrst dialogue can accept diversity of opinion: No theory is so false . . . that it does not contain some element of truth; no dispute is so trivial that it does not possess something that can be learned.119

An argument neither for absolute tolerance nor for doctrinal relativism, this is the ﬁrst step in a process of dialectical reﬂection120 conducted between personae that reﬂect successive stages in the formation of Abelard’s intellectual identity. When the Philosopher attacks those “madmen who shamelessly pronounce on what they fail to understand,” he borrows terms Roscelin’s pupil had used against his master. Censuring the dogmatism that cuts them off from communion with others who do not share their opinions, he deﬁnes their position as proprie secte singularitas, in language that Abelard had heard applied to himself at Soissons.121 But if, in his debate with the Jew, the Philosopher echoes the polemic conducted between 1118 and 1121, in his discussion with the Christian the same drive to condemn is checked by a move unmatched in any of Abelard’s other writings. The turning-point of the Collationes occurs when the iudex abdicates his role and professes his readiness to listen.122 Declining to pursue the goal that remained central to Abelard’s theological enterprise, the arbiter withdraws and prepares the way for the Christian, who gently rebukes his interlocutor’s haste. “Is it not extraordinary,” he asks, “that while denying that you are seeking a ﬁght, you claim to ﬁnd Jews foolish and Christians mad? Why then do you pretend to seek truth and wisdom from them? Is their insanity to disappear at your enquiry? Are they there to serve the purposes of your scholarship? Those converted by the uncouth apostles, as they seemed to the Greek philosophers, were wholly out of their minds. Yet their madness took root in Greece, celebrated a great council, ﬁlled the world, and repressed all forms of heresy.”123 This from the persona of a Christian imagined by the heretic condemned at the council of Soissons—by the Abelard who, in his theological works, was not slow to denounce others’ mistakes as insania. Tolerant expositor of the nature of faith and the highest good, outarguing but never dominating the Philosopher, the Christian exhibits that sense for the permissibility of error for which the author of the Collationes elsewhere pleaded less convincingly. Deferential to guidance, the pagan is led, like Boethius, by argument and suggestion, and corrected with Philosophia’s ﬁrmness when 119

Dialogus, p. 43,68–71. Cf. R. Thomas, “Die meditative Dialektik im Dialogus inter Philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum,” in Peter Abelard, ed. Buytaert, pp. 98 –115. 121 Dialogus, p. 46,129– 38. 122 Ibid., p. 84,1165ff. 123 Ibid., p. 85,1182– 91–p. 86,1192– 98. 120

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he lowers the tone. With all the tact of the dialogue-form that Abelard admired in the Consolatio,124 the hermeneutic crux of non solum ab invicem diversa sed etiam invicem adversa formulated in the ﬁrst sentence of Sic et non125 is resolved by an ecumenical exchange. Through the serene exercise of that magisterium so contentiously asserted in the successive versions of Abelard’s theology, one of their central theses is demonstrated. His misapprehensions patiently explained, the Philosopher is initiated into the secrets of the faith. At the end he is made to seem more suitable for admission to the elect than many Christians who already count themselves among the number of the chosen. Like the Soliloquium,126 a brief dialogue between two parts of himself which considers the relationship between wisdom and the Word, this private meditation separates into distinct but compatible personae the discordant sounds of Abelard’s public voice. Otherwise capable of no variation between the allegro of self-applause and the fortissimo of aggression, he evinces in those two works the qualities that made him famous as a teacher. The tragedy of the Peripateticus Palatinus was less to have followed the theological route that led to condemnation at Rome than to have deviated from the path opened by the Collationes. The way dictated by fortune led to “barbarous Brittany.” There Abelard preached as a magister. His Sermo 33 (perhaps the exhortatio ad fratres et commonachos to which the abbot of Saint-Gildas alludes in his Soliloquium127) was written for the feast of John the Baptist on 24 July 1127/ 28 and addressed to monks, described as “vile, ungovernable, and undisciplined,” whom he attempted to reform.128 To these renegades from the rule living in concubinage, a notorious eunuch set out to read a lesson on the advantages of eremitical castration, illustrated by the ﬁgure of the gelded wild ass.129 If a sense of himself was Abelard’s strong point, empathy with his audience was not. As their abbot expounded his allegory, the snickers of his boorish brethren may be readily imagined. Solitudo, traditionally signifying isolation from the world,130 was in124 Cf. P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et postérité de Boèce (Paris, 1967), pp. 54ff. 125 Sic et non, p. 89, 1–2. 126 C. Burnett, ed., “Peter Abelard, Soliloquium,” SM ser. 3b, 25 (1984), pp. 857– 94. 127 As an alternative to Burnett’s suggestion that the Soliloquium preceded Theologia christiana, the following pages propose, on grounds of their common themes, to date both to the period of Abelard’s abbacy at St. Gildas. 128 PL 178, 582– 607. 129 Ibid., 583B. 130 See J. Leclercq, Études sur le vocabulaire monastique du Moyen âge (Rome, 1961), pp. 18ff.; D. Luscombe, Peter Abelard (London, 1979), p. 24; Miethke, “Abelards Stellung,,” pp. 178–79; and Constable, Reformation, pp. 135ff.

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vested with a new and different meaning by Abelard. He who was to ﬂee from Saint-Gildas, as he had been driven from Saint-Denis and would leave Cluny for Saint-Marcel,131 took as his model the evangelist who “had philosophized with the angels.”132 To the frustrated leader of a rebellious community, John the Baptist represented not cloistered withdrawal but ascetic contemplation. Remote from the careerism and cupidity that beset modern monks,133 John might be linked to the tradition of learning and insight transmitted by the virtuous pagans that is celebrated by Abelard in his Soliloquium and in his theologies. Diogenes and Socrates, forerunners of Christ,134 helped to explain why the savior was identiﬁed with wisdom.135 Scholarship and study were the proper occupations for his followers. They should not aim at advancement in the hierarchy, for titles meant little. The terms bishop and cleric designated rather an ofﬁce or a function than devotion or sanctity;136 and Jerome, by the paradox of his “horned syllogism,” demonstrated that devotees of the vita contemplativa, in their humility, were elevated above the proud and the ambitious.137 Addressing the monks of Saint-Gildas in terms more suitable for his students at Paris, Abelard held up to them the image of himself presented in the Historia calamitatum and Theologia christiana. His sermon transformed the traditional ﬁgure of the “philosopher”-monk138 into a shunner of the establishment. Disdainful of the wordly and detached from the cenobitic lives, he was to view himself less as a member of a community than as a link in the continuity of reﬂection. Jerome, Diogenes, and Socrates represented the ideal to which he should aspire from the lonely peeks of his contemplative solitude, looking down on proud prelates, grasping clerics, and base laity with a high-mindedness that was above the heads of Abelard’s unintellectual audience. If Sermo 33 fell ﬂat at Saint-Gildas, it stands at the center of Abelard’s ecclesiological thought, reveals some of its strengths and weaknesses, and serves to explain why other views he held were regarded with suspicion. While his opinion (neither analyzed nor elaborated) that the bishops held no more than a dignitas in ordine ﬁnds parallels in the common failure of 131 D. E. Luscombe, “Pierre Abélard et le monachisme,” in Pierre Abélard. Pierre le Vénérable, pp. 271–76, esp. 274. 132 PL 178, 585D. 133 Ibid., 587B ff. 134 Ibid., 591D-592B. 135 See J. Leclercq, “Ad ipsam Sophiam Christum. Das monastische Zeugnis Abaelards,” in Sapienter ordinare. Festgabe für E. Kleinedam, ed. F. Hoffmann et al. (Leipzig, 1969), pp. 179–98. 136 PL 178, 598C. 137 Ibid., 602A. 138 See J. Leclercq, Études sur le vocabulaire monastique, pp. 39 – 69.

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episcopate,139

scholasticism to develop a convincing theology of the Abelard’s stress on meritum rather than ofﬁcium—on personal vocation, not hierarchical or juridical status—aligned him with the anti-ecclesiastical tendencies of lay spirituals being condemned, in the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century, as heretical.140 A similar position is taken in Abelard’s Ethics, which denounce ignorant prelates and their arbitrary imposition of penance.141 Indiscreet and arrogant, negligent and greedy, lacking religion but obsessed with power, the bishops had forgotten that their potestas derived not from “the sublimity of Peter’s chair but the dignity of his merits.”142 So too with abbots, as often attacked in Abelard’s theological writings as the monks whom he reprimanded in Brittany. There, in the tirade parallel to Sermo 33 known by its incipit as Adtendite a falsis prophetis,143 he inveighed against “secular monks” who prided themselves on their “singularity,” meddled in lay affairs, and rushed about the world, driven by lust for preferment.144 The reference has been taken to be to Bernard of Clairvaux, although it was no less applicable to Suger of Saint-Denis—and, in part, to Abelard himself. “Publicly” these authors of prize orations reveled in their magisterial eloquence (de sermonum magisteriis gloriantes), which made them the “masters of bishops,” sneered an Abelard proscribed by the ecclesiastical establishment for the public character of his own magisterium. Now the boot was on the other foot, and the master declared, in the maxim of Saint Jerome, that “it is a monk’s duty to weep, not to teach.”145 The truth was that, as an abbot, Abelard had never ceased to teach. Remorselessly didactic, he clung, in his preaching, to the role of magister that had made his theological instruction both beloved and odious. Relegated to a backwater, he pursued, with small sense of occasion or audience, themes of personal interest that served to mark his estrangement from his community. And his rhetoric of reform, general yet acerbic, made it difﬁcult to distinguish Abelard’s speciﬁc critique of the hierarchy from a position all too vaguely anti-institutional. A work like Sermo 33 that took soli139 Y. Congar, L’ Église de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne (Paris, 1970), pp. 173–74. Cf. below, pp. 112ff. 140 Ibid., pp. 198ff., esp. 202– 3. 141 Peter Abelard’s Ethics, ed. D. Luscombe (Oxford, 1971), pp. 104 and 108. See further below, p. 146. 142 Ibid., p. 118,1– 3. 143 L. J. Engels, ed., “Adtendite a falsis prophetis (Ms. Colmar 128,ff. 152v –153v). Un texte de Pierre Abélard contre les Cisterciens retrouvé?” in Corona Gratiarum. Miscellanea patristica, historica et liturgica E. Dekkers O.S.B. XII lustra complenti oblata (Brugge, 1975), 2, p. 195–228. 144 Ibid., p. 226,18,23; p. 227,65 – 67. 145 For context see Bynum, “Docere verbo et exemplo,” pp. 226ff., and cf. above, pp. 17ff.

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tude as its theme demonstrated only its author’s isolation. Insight was conﬁned to his analogy with John the Baptist—a voice, like Abelard’s, crying in the wilderness. While he languished in isolation, Bernard of Clairvaux advanced to prominence. At the council of Étampes in 1130, he was (according to his biographer Arnold of Bonneval) unanimously chosen, by King Louis VII and the French bishops, to be their spokesman. Having pronounced against the antipope Anacletus in favor of Innocent II,146 Bernard had been awarded, in 1132, the title “indefatigable defensor ﬁdei” by the grateful pontiff.147 But while the establishment looked up to him, lesser authorities talked down. Abelard, in 1131, took it on himself to lecture Bernard on the issue of a variant in the pater noster employed by Héloise’s nuns at the Paraclete.148 Matthew, on whose evidence the reading supersubstantialis (instead of quotidianus) had been adopted, was to be preferred, as a witness of Christ’s thought, to Luke. The Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by the apostle, had more weight than preaching before the populace. Numerology and Greek tradition buttressed the arguments for the contested adjective: reason was to take priority over usage; custom should yield to truth. This favorite adage of Gregory VII,149 delivered de haut en bas, was more than irritating: it voiced a scholar’s claim to determine the hermeneutic fashions of the moment, according to his own deﬁnition of veritas. For Bernard of Clairvaux, a combative preacher coram populo inclined to identify orthodoxy with ecclesiastical tradition yet capable of altering, when it served his purposes, the text of holy writ,150 truth possessed a different meaning.151 146 See B. Jacqueline, Episcopat et papauté chez Saint Bernard de Clairvaux (Saint-Lô, 1975), pp. 65–81 and J. R. Sommerfeldt, “Charismatic and Gregorian Leadership in the Thought of Bernard of Clairvaux,” in Bernard of Clairvaux. Studies Presented to Dom J. Lerclercq (Washington, D.C., 1973), pp. 73 – 90, esp. 78 – 84. 147 See A. H. Bredero, “La Vie et la Vita prima,” in Bernard de Clairvaux. Histoire, mentalités, spiritualité, Colloque de Lyon-Cîteaux-Dijon (Paris,1992), p. 67 and n. 23. 148 Ep. 10, ed Smits, pp. 239 – 47 with P. Zerbi, “‘Panem nostrum superstantialem’. Abelardo polemista ed esegeta nell’ ep. X,” in id., “Ecclesia in hoc mundo posita.” Studi di storia e di storiographia medioevale (Milan, 1993), pp. 491– 511, and C. Waddell, “Peter Abelard’s Letter 10 and Cistercian Liturgical Reform,” in Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 2, ed. J. R. Sommerfeldt (Kalamazoo, 1976), pp. 75 – 86. 149 See A. Gouron, “Non dixit: ‘ego sum consuetudo’,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 74 (1988), pp. 133 – 40. 150 Cf. P. S. Grill, “Bernard von Clairvaux als Exeget,” in Festschrift zum 800 Jahrgedächtnis des Todes Bernards von Clairvaux (Vienna, 1953), pp. 9–21. On Bernard’s preaching, see G. Constable, “The Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century,” Viator 25 (1994), pp. 131–52, esp. 145ff. 151 Contrast A. Borst, “Abälard und Bernard,” Historische Zeitschrift 186 (1958), pp. 497–526, esp. 504 – 5.

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The issue was hardly the application of reason, which Bernard adduced to defend the Cistercians’ revisions to the liturgy.152 When he claimed that their version was “not new and trivial but ancient and authentic,” he was both sharing Abelard’s standards and rejecting them. Authenticity, the prime criterion of Ep. 10, Bernard viewed as an enterprise of restoration, guided by reason, nature, and antiquity. It was when Abelard, distinguishing between the “profane novelties” condemned by Saint Paul (1 Timothy 6:20), denied that novitas was heretical,153 that his argument was shunned by the Cistercian defender of tradition. Change for the better should be understood as the recovery of lost verities. The implication of pluralism in Abelard’s tolerance of novelty resisted, his insistence on contextual interpretation was ignored. Context, to Bernard, counted for little. His standards were absolute. Who was Abelard to read him a lesson in interpretation? The answer lay in the abbot of Saint-Gildas’s fourteenth sermon and in his Expositio orationis dominicae “Multorum legimus orationes,” where the case for supersubstantialis was restated with undiminished insistence.154 To read quotidianus, argued Abelard, was tantamount to “correcting” Christ or the apostles—and substantially the same arguments followed. Neither in preaching directed to his monks nor in correspondence with a brotherabbot was the slightest effort made to adapt Abelard’s magisterial pose to those for whom his works were intended. Derived from superior scholarship, his title to instruct was liable to be challenged by those who did not accept its premise that secular learning should be among the qualities of a Christian philosopher. Coherent in his own terms, Abelard was insensitive to others based on positions that he rejected or on institutions that he mistrusted. Disputes, he insisted, should be settled by the intrinsic strength of each side’s arguments. Swift to assert the reasonableness of his own, he was impatient with those who failed to acknowledge their justice. That attitude courted accusations of praesumptio and precipitousness, as Abelard recognized in his Carmen ad Astralabium. In his didactic poem to his son, this swiftest of thinkers warned against haste. “Beware of instant masters,” wrote the former youthful prodigy whose splendors and miseries as a teacher are described in the Historia calamitatum. “I do not want you to follow the teaching of those who, 152 See Constable, Reformation, p. 143 and n. 79 and C. Waddell, “Peter Abelard’s ‘Letter 10’,” and “St. Bernard and the Cistercian Ofﬁce at the Abbey of the Paraclete,” in The Chimaera of His Age. Studies on Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, 1980), pp. 76 –121. 153 Ep. 10, ed. Smits, pp. 246,205ff. On the subject see B. Smalley, “Ecclesiastical Attitudes to Novelty, c. 1100 –1250,” Studies in Church History 12 (1975), pp. 113 – 31. 154 PL 178, 494B and C. Burnett, ed., “The ‘Expositio Orationis Dominicae’ Multorum legimus orationes. Abelard’s Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer?” Revue bénédictine 95 (1985), pp. 60–72.

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under pressure, make up what they have to instruct.”155 Astralabe was to learn by Abelard’s example. The charges formulated so hurriedly against Roscelin and pressed with the sound and fury of Theologia “Summi boni” had rebounded on their author. Now there was no way back, and this misplaced monk and unsuccessful abbot rewrote, with obsessive care, the work intended to compensate for his failure in the institutional parts he had tried to play. If episcopal magisterium was dubious and abbatial inﬂuence suspect, he would prove, in that ﬁnal product of a thwarted talent in search of recognition, the Theologia “scholarium,” that the philosopher might be sacralized. Naturally he was forced to do so. Never, asserts his rhetoric, did Abelard take the initiative. As in its previous versions, so runs his argument in the Theologia “scholarium,” composed at the request of his pupils as a summa of divinity, an introduction to scripture. Distinguishing between the truths he did not purport to teach and the opinions requested by his students,156 Abelard began his book with a careful deﬁnition of heresy, the charge that he repeatedly sought to forestall.157 Augustine and Jerome again buttressed his preventive argument in self-defense, conducted on a familiar terrain chosen between the stringency of the bigots and the errors of the pagans. Signaling a spirit of concession in a change of tone, Abelard now acknowledged that his critics had to be countered; that alterations proposed on the basis of sound reason or the authority of holy writ should be accepted.158 No longer viewed as infallible, Augustine offered, in the Retractationes, a model for revision.159 Compelled by the menace of controversy to adopt a pose of accommodation, Abelard declared himself willing to change his mind. And with the assurance that derived from the resumption, during the mid-to-late 1130s, of his teaching at Paris under the patronage of the inﬂuential Stephen of Garland,160 he attempted to redeﬁne his magisterium in terms of the merits of his pupils. Still an élite of learning akin to the ancient philosophers, whose premonition of the Christian mysteries he 155 “Disce diu ﬁrmaque tibi tardaque docere / atque ad scribendum ne cito procilias! / Nolo repentini tua sit doctrina magistri, / qui cogatur adhuc ﬁngere que doceat.” Ed. J. M. H. Rubingh-Bosscher, Peter Abelard. Carmen ad Astralabum (Gronigen, 1987), p. 107, vv. 27–30. 156 Theologia “Scholarium.” Recensiores breviores, in Petri Abelardi Opera Theologica 3, ed. E. M. Buytaert, CCCM 12 (Turnhout, 1969) 5, p. 402,43 – 44. 157 Ibid., 8, p. 403,76 – 84. 158 Theologia “Scholarium” 3, praef. 6, p. 314,44 – 49. 159 C. Mews, in ibid., p. 206. 160 R. H. Bautier, “Paris au temps d’Abélard,” in Abélard en son temps, Actes du colloque international organisé à l’occasion du 9e centenaire de la naissance de Pierre Abélard (14 –19 mai 1979) (Paris, 1981), pp. 21–77, esp. 53 –75.

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defend,161

continued to they were set apart, in matters of doctrine, from the common herd. This line of thought, exclusive but orthodox, became disturbing only when Abelard described the conduct of the philosophi with whom he aligned his followers. Sharing with the multitude of fools the external forms of religious observance, the pagan thinkers whom he admired had declared in private their contempt for false idols. As the Jews were confuted by the prophets, so the heathens could be routed by the philosophers. Perfecti in possession of an inner core of truth hidden from the ignorant and the profane, they heralded the apostles and the saints. Attempting to integrate their alternative tradition into that of the church, Abelard employed language that suggested the alienness of his heroes. This image of the transmission of knowledge from one elite to another reinforced, in the strife-riven atmosphere of the 1130s, the impression of a sect.162 Abelard’s thought, distorted by the oral tradition of his pupils, lent itself to misrepresentation; and not every theologian was as inclined to separate the source from its tainted tributaries as Walter of Mortagne. Yet even he took a ﬁrm if humorous line: “You (plural), it seems to me, do not yet surpass the perfection of the angels.”163 If Walter’s ﬁrmness pointed to Abelard’s exaggeration, humor indicated the overweeningness present both in his pupils’ claims and in arguments that their master repeated, hardly modiﬁed, from Theologia “Summi boni.” The philosophers and prophets, according to Abelard, shared an aversion from vulgaria verba and an inclination to analogy and metaphor.164 Arcaneness defended against the “nakedness” of public exposition,165 Plato was made the model for a style of interpretation faithful to nature’s wish to withdraw from the crude scrutiny of the inexpert.166 At this rariﬁed level, pagan and Christian traditions might be harmonized. The mistakes of an Origen abstracted, his insights could be preserved. Taking up against heretics and philosophers the arms they had provided, “the puny David would do battle with the huge and blustering Goliath.”167 Familiar from earlier versions of Abelard’s theology, this martial imagery now began to acquire a new urgency. Promising, with misunderstandable 161

Theologia “scholarium” 1, 113 –14, pp. 362– 63. On the later use of the term perfecti by the Cathars, see A. Borst, Die Katharer, 5th ed. (Freiburg, 1991), pp. 151ff. 163 “Restat igitur, ut loquatur de perfectissima scientia illius geniturae. Sed si ad eam sancti angeli non ascendunt, tunc profecto est incredibile vos ad illam perfectissimam scientiam pervenisse, quod vestri iactitant discipuli. Nondum enim, ut opinor, perfectionem angelicam transcendistis.” Walter of Mortagne, Sententiae Florianenses, ed. H. Ostlender, Florilegium Patristicum 19 (Bonn, 1929), p. 37,32– 36–p. 38, 7ff. 164 Theologia “scholarium,” 1, 158, p. 383,1838– 45. 165 Ibid., 1, 163, p. 385,1877– 81. 166 Ibid., 1, 164, p. 385,1886 –1916. 167 Ibid., 2, 17, p. 414,231ff. 162

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modesty, to provide not the truth “but at least something close to human reason and not contrary to the faith,” and reafﬁrming his invidious distinction between the majority of animales and the minority of spirituales, Abelard offered the likes of William and Bernard both too little and more than enough. Too little, in the sense of mere probability in doctrinal matters, and more than enough, in that a defense of the relevance of lay to ecclesiastical culture was on the verge of becoming, in Theologia “scholarium,” a full-blown apology for the litterati. Knowledge, insisted Abelard with arguments elaborated from Theologia christiana, was of more use than religionis meritum. The saints who, before their conversion, had been trained in secular learning had gone on to surpass others by their proﬁciency in sacred erudition.168 Paul and Augustine were cited by this master in the schools to establish the lineage from which he traced his own descent (in contrast to Bernard of Clairvaux, whose teachers were allegedly the oak trees and the beeches).169 And the point was pressed, characteristically, up to and beyond its limits. If Lucifer illustrated the sin of learned pride, that did not discredit the pursuit of knowledge, for it was worth remembering that, through his superior scientia, the devil had attained primacy among the angels.170 As Abelard gained in conﬁdence, his provocations increased. Those who wished to preclude the discussion of the trinity had forgotten the argument, formulated by the apostle (1 Corinthians 11:19), that heresy was a test for orthodoxy.171 Because the two stood in a dialectical relationship, the necessity of reasoned argument, private domain of trained litterati, was urged even more forcefully than before. But coercive force should be avoided,172 declared Abelard, while borrowing from Hilary of Poitiers metaphors of combat at variance with his irenic intent.173 In a tone that alternated between belligerance and conciliation, the magister aimed to widen his scope, discussing, in Theologia “scholarium,” issues such as faith, charity, and the sacraments that previous versions had omitted or treated summarily.174 Fulness, however, did not imply completeness. Offering a construct of dogma based on analogies and probabilities, Abelard both denied the capacity of his methods to deﬁne the highest truth and argued for a notion of propriety in theological discourse. No, that did not imply that he was exclusive or narrow-minded: such objections could be countered 168

Ibid., 2, 31, p. 422, 471–76. On Bernard’s position see Constable, Reformation, pp. 140f. 170 Ibid., 2, 31, p. 423,443 – 504. 171 Theologia “scholarium” 2, 37, p. 425,572ff. 172 Ibid., 2, 41, p 427,616ff. 173 Ibid., 2, 43, p. 429,678 – 84. 174 Cf. C. Mews, “The Sententiae of Peter Abelard,” RTAM 53 (1986), pp. 130 – 83, esp. 165. 169

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by proclaiming his desire to open debate of issues that others wished to prohibit.175 Prohibition, of course, was not Abelard’s objective, but restriction to the select group of those capable of grasping that the menace to the Christian polity announced in Theologia christiana was now erupting into internecine strife.176 Few points of comparison between Theologia “scholarium” and its earlier versions reveal more about the evolution of his attitudes than the catalogue of modern heresies that Abelard drew up shortly before being recondemned on the same head. In the half-prophetic, half-magisterial tones adopted in Sermo 33, the fourth book of Theologia “scholarium” visualizes readers prone to blame him and reluctant to attend to his message. To them, an audience hostile or indifferent, Abelard announced, “Should anyone persist in censuring me and, since the times of peril are not yet upon us, wholly reject or pay no attention to my writings, let him at least listen to Saint Jerome.”177 Still feeling the stigma of 1121, this hounder of heretics emphasized the dependability of his sources before issuing, ex cathedra, a declaration of civil war.178 The battle cry, taken from Horace—“You have never lacked an enemy”—referred not to external enemies but to foes in the bosom of the church. These subverters of the ecclesiastical polity were “all the worse” for being native, domestic, internal. Unnoticed, they had been admitted or inﬁltrated by others, who thought heresy so effectively repressed that there was no need to establish “the fundaments of the faith.” On the contrary, argued the alert inquisitor, never had heresy raged so furiously as among his contemporaries.179 Denunciation, speciﬁc and virulent, followed. Tanchelm of Utrecht and Peter of Bruis are identiﬁed by name and error. Yet when Abelard turned to the magistri divinorum librorum, holders of “pestilential chairs,” his invective was tempered by the anonymity of his references to “those teaching in Francia and Burgundy, Bourges and Angers.”180 And if anonymity did not preclude identiﬁcation—Alberic of Reims is, naturally, easy to 175

Theologia “scholarium,” 2, 36, p. 424,545ff. Ibid., 2, 62, p. 439,981– 83. 177 “Quod si adhuc aliquis in meam perseveret reprehensionem et, cum nondum illa periculosa tempora instent, nostra penitus abiiciat vel non curet scripta, illud tandem Hieronymi audiat.” Theologia christiana, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. Mews, Petri Abaelardi opera theologica, CCCM 13 (Turnhout, 1987), 4,75, p. 300,1091– 95. 178 Ibid., 4, 76, p. 300,1102–p. 301,1105. 179 “Ad hereticos venio, qui quanto domesticiores, tanto peiores civilibus bellis ecclesiam inquietare non cessant. Atque ut ad nostra veniamus tempora quibus iam, ut aiunt, hereses adeo repressas esse ut iam nullo ﬁdei fundamento sit opus, nullos in tantam olim insaniam prorumpuisse hereticos quisquam audierit, quanta nonnulli contemporaneorum nostrorum debachati sunt.” Theologia “scholarium,” 2, 62, p. 438,977–p. 439,983. 180 Ibid., 2, 63, p. 439,995—p. 440,1003 with Mews, “Peter Abelard’s Theologia Reexamined,” pp. 152– 53. 176

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spot—the aim, in this part of the proscription, was less to focus on individuals than to indicate the geographical spread of the disease. Its effects were all the more disturbing because the opinions that Abelard condemned were not merely held by members of his own profession but also taught by them to others. Nowhere, during the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century, is the criminal link between scholarship and heresy drawn so tightly as in the fourth book of a Theologia “scholarium” written by the prime offender. The lesson of Soissons, imperfectly learned by Abelard, was now to be applied to his tormenters. The climate had changed, he announced, and a harvest of dissent was springing up from the seedbeds of the church.181 Alone and intrepid, he would wield the scythe. Not only the likes of Peter of Bruis should be castigated but also the serried ranks of magistri who “surrounded” him. The gauntlet thrown down, his rivals were faced with a choice between acknowledging Abelard’s authority or demonstrating his error. None of them protested. The challenge came from William of SaintThierry who, in 1139, wrote to Bernard of Clarivaux a letter that has often been regarded as an attempt to victimize Abelard. The contrary is nearer the truth. What he endured a year later had been provoked by himself. In 1139–40, those not disposed to accept him as David condemned him as Goliath. Friendship, neither denied nor forgotten, lent edge to William’s attack.182 Nothing personal motivated his criticism of Abelard, but rather, a concern for the state of the ecclesiastical polity strictly parallel to that voiced in Theologia “christiana” and Theologia “scholarium.” William set out to make an example of this magister in his own terms, only one of which was theological. Arguing that a proven heretic had no right to represent himself as a defender of the faith, William did not aspire to that title. Or so he stated in 1139, appealing less to his own judgment than to that of Bernard and Geoffrey of Chartres. Stationing the abbot of Clairvaux on a level comparable to that of the papal legate to France, William depicted himself as a mere “nobody” before these “lords and fathers.”183 Lacking their standing, formal or charismatic, Abelard’s denouncer possessed the advantage of experience. As early as 1125, William had begun to report on “scandals 181

Theologia “scholarium,” 2, 67, p. 441,1037– 39. “Dilexi et ego eum, et diligere vellem. . . .” Leclercq, ed., Recueil 4, p. 353,79 with D. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: The Inﬂuence of Abelard’s Thought on the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969), p. 50. Cf. Zerbi, “Guillaume de Saint-Thierry et son différend avec Abélard,” in id., “Ecclesia in hoc mundo posita,” pp. 549 –76 and T. M. Tomasic, “William of Saint-Thierry against Peter Abelard: A Dispute on the Meaning of Being a Person,” Analecta Cisterciensia 28 (1972), pp. 3–76. 183 “Cogor vos alloqui nullus in hominibus, domini et patres.” Leclercq, ed., Recueil 4, p. 351,6. On the context, cf. J. Miethke, “Theologenprozesse.” 182

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. . . in the kingdom of God.” The phrase is Bernard’s, who portrayed himself as deferring to his admirer’s command.184 Imperative was the tone of the monk’s letter: with the purity of the faith, laboriously preserved by the apostles, martyrs, and doctors of the church, William contrasted the “ﬁlth of our age.” The suspect novelty of Abelard’s teaching and writing, so widely and dangerously diffused that “they are said to be authoritative even in the Roman curia,” posed a threat “both to God’s church and to you.”185 The integrity of Christian doctrine and the status of its guardians were linked in William’s troubled mind. In the style of Abelard, he assumed the persona of Isaiah, decrying the evils of the age. The ﬁrst of them was a dearth of “teachers of ecclesiastical doctrine.” Into that void—as William viewed it, sweeping aside the theologians of his own generation—had rushed Abelard, “a censor of the faith, not its disciple; its emender, not its imitator.” This enemy from within the church was arrogating to himself a singulare magisterium.186 These were exactly the terms in which Alberic of Reims was attacked in the Theologia christiana and the Theologia “scholarium.”187 Here, rather than in Abelard’s questionable application of dialectic to theology, lay William’s ﬁrst objection. From this premise followed his list of errors—in due and proper form, but secondary and subordinate. Described in his own words as a domesticus inimicus,188 Abelard had succeeded in rousing the alarm that he wished to cause. His “own inventions,” his “yearly novelties” asserted an improper, because personal, primacy. Most seriously of all, according to William, the disease was infectious. The innovator drew a following. In 1139, as in 1121, abuse could not be remedied by private admonition or conﬁdential reprimand, because “the evil . . . had become so public.”189 That accusation, familiar from Soissons, indicated the ecclesiological di184 “Quod me huiusmodi operam dare iubes, per quod tollendum sit scandalum de regni Dei, libenter accepi.” Ep. 84 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 7, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1974), p. 219,4 – 5. 185 Leclercq, ed., Recueil 4, p. 351,18 –24. 186 “Cum enim graviter turbarer ad insolitas in ﬁde vocum novitates et novas inauditorum sensuum adinventiones, cum non haberem in quem me refundere, vos in omnibus elegi, ad quos me converterem, et quos in causam Dei et totius Latinae Ecclesiae citarem. Vos etiam timet homo ille et reformidat. Claudite oculos! Quem timebit? Et qui iam dicit quod dicit, quid non dicet, cum nullum timebit? Emortuis quippe ex Ecclesia omnibus paene doctrinae ecclesiasticae magistris, quasi in vacuam rempublicam Ecclesiae domesticus irruens inimicus, singulare sibi in ea magisterium arripuit, agens in scriptura divina quod agere solebat in dialectica, proprias adinventiones, annuas novitates; censor ﬁdei, non discipulus; emendator, non imitator.” Ibid., p. 352,37– 49. 187 See above, pp. 78 and 89. 188 Cf. Theologia “scholarium” 2, 61– 62, p. 438, 975 –78. 189 “Nec secreta commonitione seu correptione malum hoc attentandum est, quod, ipso se prodente, tam publicum factum est.” Leclercq, ed., Recueil 4, p. 353,81– 83.

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mension of the case. Conﬁdent of his inﬂuence, overweening in his individualism, the ruthless self-promoter feared only Geoffrey and William. That duumvirate dreaded by Abelard should now ﬁll the gap William saw in the “desolate state of the church.” They were to be the true doctrinae ecclesiasticae magistri, in opposition to the singulare . . . magisterium usurped by this “censor and emender of the faith.” So it was that the dialectic of intellectual dominance elaborated, in Abelard’s theologies, between himself and his rivals in the schools was transferred, by William of Saint-Thierry, to an authority outside them. Usually considered the opposite of Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux was cast by his ally in the role of contender for the same title. “A just move, and a necessary one,” deemed Bernard in his reply.190 If he demurred, it was because he doubted his competence, had other obligations, was unacquainted with the details. The remainder of the story has often been told: the meetings with Abelard, apparently cordial in tone but, according to the procedure recommended by Matthew (18:15), leading to a denuntiatio evangelica;191 Bernard’s sermon in Notre Dame with many of the accused’s pupils in the congregation; Abelard’s attempt to provoke a debate and mobilize support; the abbot of Clairvaux’s success in avoiding the planned disputatio and his invitation to the bishops assembled at Sens to condemn the impugned opinions; Abelard’s Christlike silence at the council broken by his letter deploring Bernard’s envy and citing the same lines from Horace (Odes 2.10.11–12) which Geoffrey of Chartres had allegedly quoted at Soissons.192 From the welter of accusations and the confusion of maneuvers, one fact emerges with clarity: the opponents were operating on two different levels. Bernard, skilful manipulator of the hierarchy, swung its auctoritas behind him. Abelard, relying on his own to secure the debate he was conﬁdent of winning, was anxious, when he failed at Sens, to avoid a repeat of Soissons. Appealing to Rome, he had understood that the issue was less intellectual than institutional. Yet he persevered, in his Apologia, on the course that had led to his difﬁculties, with a countercharge that Bernard’s imputations of heresy could not be answered by rational means and with a 190 “Motum vestrum et iustum iudico et necessarium.” Ep. 327 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 263,6. 191 See L. Kolmer, “Abaelard and Bernhard von Clairvaux in Sens,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 67 (1981), pp. 121– 47, esp. 127 and n. 23. 192 See Jaeger, “Peter Abelard’s Silence,” pp. 31– 54 and R. Klibansky, “Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. A Letter by Abelard,” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1961), pp. 1–27, esp. 7,21–22. Cf. Historia calamitatum, p. 86,803– 4.

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defeat.193

challenge to produce written evidence or, failing that, to accept These criteria of the scholar, accepted eight years later by the Cistercian pope who sat in judgment on Gilbert of Poitiers, in 1140 fell on earth scorched by the prosecution. Its case, as Abelard saw it, was motivated by invidia, livor, and odium. How accurate were these positions that he ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux? The same questions were raised by Bernard himself, in the many letters about Abelard’s trial with which he bombarded the pope and the curia. Among the generalized polemic, three writings stand out for their vividness of language. One was addressed to Cardinal Ivo of Asbach: “Master Peter Abelard, a monk without a rule, a prelate without responsibility, neither maintains order nor is maintained in order. That contradiction of a man has the outward appearance of Saint John and the inner nature of Herod: wholly ambiguous, he possesses nothing of the monk save the name and the habit. But what about me? . . . “194 What about Bernard indeed? The wordplay with which he evokes the ambiguity of Abelard ﬁnds a parallel in one of his later letters to Pope Eugenius III: “I am a kind of modern chimera, neither cleric nor layman. For I have long cast off the monastic way of life, not the habit.”195 Monstrous was his life, afﬂicted his conscience196 —and not without reason, for the charges that Bernard of Clairvaux leveled against Peter Abelard might have been turned against himself. “Every man shall bear his own burden” continued the accused’s double, justifying his intervention on the grounds that it “pertains to all who love the name of Christ.”197 Bishops and popes, according to Bernard’s deﬁnition, were charged with correcting the rebellious.198 Abelard “increases and diminishes every single matter, altering at will.” Exceeding the measure allotted to him, this fabricator of lies and worshiper of false doctrines 193 “Nonnulla etiam mihi pro criminibus ingeris tamquam heretica, quae nulla ratione, nulla possint auctoritate refelli. Profer scriptum, si potes, et me convincas haereticum; vel si hoc non potes, te ipsum confundas tanta mala ﬁngentem in proximum.” Apologia, 4 and 5, in CCCM 11, ed. C. Mews, p. 361,76 –78 and 362,82– 84. 194 “Magister Petrus Abaelardus, sine regula monachus, sine sollicitudine prelatus, nec ordinem tenet, nec tenetur ab ordine. Homo sibi dissimilis est—intus Herodes, foris Ioannes— totus ambiguus, nihil habens de monacho praeter nomen et habitum. Sed quid ad me?” Ep. 193 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 44,17–19, p. 45,1. 195 “Ego enim quaedam chimaera mei saeculi, nec clericum gero nec laicum. Nam monachi iamdudum exui conversationem, non habitum.” Ep. 250 in ibid., p. 147,2– 3. 196 Ibid., with T. J. Renna, “Bernard and Abelard: An Ecclesiological Conﬂict,” in Simplicity and Ordinariness. Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 4 (1980), pp. 94–138, esp. 108ff. 197 Ep. 193 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 45,1– 3. 198 See further below.

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pretended to understand everything—except himself. Delineating the failings of his opponent, the abbot of Clairvaux painted a self-portrait. Their difference lay in the length of their memories. Abelard and his work, Bernard recalled, had been condemned at Soissons in the presence of a papal legate. Compounding his previous errors, the heretic was conﬁdent in the support of those at the curia whom he boasted had been his pupils. For this champion of tradition, not just the latest teachings of the subversive were at stake but also the validity of the previous judgment. Abelard relied on his Roman adherents “to defend him against charges past and present.” Acquittal in 1140, insinuated Bernard, would imply annulment of the ruling of 1121. And, conversely, sanctions now would serve to validate the precedent set then. The reason was never stated, although the sense was plain. The self-appointed broker in curial politics199 felt his position threatened. Hence dark mutterings against Hyacinth Boboni, present at the council of Sens. Bernard’s secretary would relate, viva voce, to Innocent II what the future pope Celestine III had said about his present master and the “curia in the curia.”200 The inquisitor had his agents, the prosecution its strategy. Abelard might rely on former students in high places, but the other “teacher of ecclesiastical doctrine” exercising his own version of singulare magisterium did not doubt that God was on his side. This dragon, this serpent, this suspect monk without a rule was wholly unlike the abbot of Clairvaux. For blameless Bernard, authorized to organize a chorus of condemnation at Sens and to intimidate the papal court at Rome, had direct access to The Truth. That truth could be formulated in similes, some of them conventional and vague. Although likenesses to Arius, Pelagius, and Nestorius201 were intended rather to alarm than to inform, the style in which Bernard presented his case against Abelard was indivisible from its content.202 When, writing to the bishops and cardinals of the curia, the accuser evoked the paschal lamb being boiled in deﬁance of God’s command, or savagely torn to bits and eaten raw,203 his metaphors of violence were designed to set the stage for an apocalyptic conﬂict. Profanation of mysteries, a bumper crop of er199 Cf. Jacqueline, Episcopat et papauté, pp. 127ff., 243ff. and S. Teubner-Schoebel, Bernhard von Clairvaux als Vermittler an der Kurie. Eine Auswertung seiner Briefsammlung (Bonn, 1991). 200 Ep. 338 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 278,18 –21. Cf. P. Zerbi, Papato, impero, e “respublica christiana” dal 1187 al 1198 (Milan, 1980), pp. 65 – 81. 201 Ibid., p. 278, 12—15. 202 On the doctrinal substance of Bernard’s polemic and its context, see J. Jolivet, “Critiques de la théologie d’ Abélard,” in id., Aspects de la pensée médiévale: Abélard. Doctrines du langage (Paris, 1987), pp. 38 – 44 and Luscombe, School of Peter Abelard, pp. 103 – 42. 203 Ep. 188, p. 11, 4 – 6.

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rors, light engulfed in darkness, and—above all—“disputes in the gutter about divinity,” while evils in the heart were committed to the page:204 Bernard, the supposed enemy of dialectic, portrayed the conﬂict between himself and Abelard in dialectical terms. They had been set by Saint Paul, as quoted by his foe. The necessity of scandal, the usefulness of heresy in the development of the church’s doctrine, are themes central to Bernard’s ﬁrst letter to Pope Innocent II.205 Perhaps the most remarkable feature of that open epistle is that it presents the correction of Abelard’s faults as a splendid opportunity. The Lord had tested the pope in the recent schism. Now, “lest anything be lacking in your crown [of glory], heresy has arisen.” Crushing that evil would bring Innocent’s tried and tested qualities to perfection, demonstrating him to be equal to his predecessors.206 Behind the compliment lurked a menace, beneath the promise a threat. The pope, who owed much to Bernard’s support during the recent struggle with Anacletus, was reminded of his debt. If Innocent II was to be put to the test, Bernard’s endurance had been proved at the recent council. There Abelard had appeared, a towering Goliath in martial array. His squire was that subversive Arnold of Brescia. With the scales of serpents and the buzzing of bees, these “angels of the night” had strode forth, conﬁdent in David’s absence. They were mistaken. Everyone else ﬂed, but Bernard, “least of mortals,” remained to face the challenge to single combat.207 Singulare certamen: the expression mimicks William of Saint-Thierry’s singulare magisterium, itself an echo of Abelard. He was now matched by a rival in self-heroization. Denying the presence of a David to contest Goliath, in a rhetoric ﬁlled with the images recurrent in Abelard’s theology,208 Bernard insinuated the opposite. Describing 204

Ibid., p. 12,2– 3. Ep. 189, p. 12–16. See H. Grundmann, “Oportet et haereses esse. Das Problem der Ketzerei im Spiegel der mittelalterlichen Bibelexegese,” in id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 1: Religiöse Bewegungen, Schriften der MGH 25,1 (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 328 – 63. 206 Ibid., p. 16,1–7. 207 Ibid., p. 14,1–14: “Procedit Golias procero corpore, nobili illo suo bellico apparatu circummunitus, antecedente quoque ipsum armigero eius Arnaldo de Brixia. Squama squamae coniungitur, et nec spiraculum incedit per eas. Siquidem sibilavit apis, quae erat in Francia, api de Italia et convenerunt in unum adversus Dominum et adversus Christum eius. Intenderunt arcum, paraverunt sagittas suas in pharetra, ut sagittent in obscuro rectos corde. In victu autem et habitu habentes formam pietatis, sed virtutem eius abnegantes, eo decipiunt plures, quo transﬁgurant se in angelos lucis, cum sint Satanae. Stans ergo Golias una cum armigero suo inter utrasque acies, clamat adversus phalangas Israel exprobratque agminibus sanctorum, eo nimirum audacius, quo sentit David non adesse. Denique in suggillationem doctorum Ecclesiae magnis effert laudibus philosophos, adinventiones illorum et suas novitates catholicorum patrum doctrinae et ﬁdei praefert et, cum omnes fugiant a facie eius, me omnium minimum expetit ad singulare certamen.” 208 See above, pp. 87, 90. 205

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himself as the victim of his enemy’s provocation,209 the prosecutor both imitated the defendant’s posture and deﬂected the charge that he was acting as judge. Abelard’s own writings sufﬁced to convict him; the affair was not of Bernard’s making; it had been up to the bishops to decide. Summoned to Sens, he had been unprepared save for his trust in God, but the aggressor had ﬂed. This was adequate to justify both a conﬁrmation of the sentence by Rome and the conduct of the abbot of Clairvaux.210 In a handful of lines, mixing metaphors with narrative, the accuser was transformed into the accused. Bernard’s initiative obscured, his attack was represented as a defense. According to him, the capitula from Abelard’s writings censured at Sens “were produced” and “read”211 —in the passive, not the active, voice—concealing his prosecutor’s role and responsibility. In this revision of events, the new Goliath’s challenge and summons to his pupils had led rumors to spread. The general expectation was for a spectaculum, but the non-David, above such gossip, had ignored it. If he came to the showdown, it was on the advice of his friends and alone. Alone he appeared before the bishops and abbots, men of religion and learning. The king was present; the throng packed; the tension high. Under such pressure, Abelard, towering monster of presumption, collapsed, abandoning the stage to that “least of mortals,” Bernard—who, by his own account, had not uttered a word. Events spoke for themselves. Abelard’s guilt exposed by his ﬂight, it only remained to remind Innocent II of his duty to seize the chance—and condemn. How and why he was to do so are set out in the tract, amply revised and widely diffused,212 that represents the climax of the epistolary drama Bernard enacted before the pope. The stage had been set at the council described in his previous letter, in which self-righteousness mingles with selfaggrandization. While the ﬁnal decision was to be taken at Rome, Innocent, after reading this inquisitor’s report, could hardly have been in doubt that he, no less than Abelard, was being arraigned before a tribunal convoked by the abbot of Clairvaux. Matters, as Bernard depicted them, had taken their course. To impede what now seemed an exorable process was to make oneself complicit with the same crimes. Let no one at Rome be deluded. Hyacinth Boboni, motivated (of course) by personal enmity, had tried to halt the course of justice, and he had failed. Nicholas of Montiéramey, Bernard’s secretary, was 209

“. . . puer sum, et ille vir bellator ab adulescentia.” Ibid., p. 14,18. Ibid., p. 14,15 –28; p. 15,1–11. 211 See E. Little, “Bernard and Abelard at the Council of Sens, 1140,” in Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux, pp. 55—72. 212 Leclercq, “Les Formes successives de la lettre-traité de saint Bernard contre Abelard,” in Recueil 4, pp. 265 – 84. All references are to the edition of Ep. 190 in S. Bernardi Opera 8, pp. 17–40. 210

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curia.213

on his way to the He would report to the holy father, guaranteeing not only that the pope was informed but also that the cardinals were observed. They were not above suspicion. Remember Abelard’s boast that he had the ear of the sacred college. That is why, in none of the several letters that Bernard addressed to the cardinals after Sens, is there ever a trace of an argument. Able intimidator, he felt no need, no wish to explain himself to the curia, nor did he do so in his epistolary tract to the pope. Is it therefore to be considered, as an examination of Abelard’s ideas, null and void?214 Did Bernard set out to analyze his opponent’s position—or to parody a stance already vulnerable to distortion? The letter opens by adopting a tartly didactic tone. “It is ﬁtting” (oportet), “it is necessary,” “it is time”: the domineering style is scarcely tempered by the impersonal verbs. Peter’s primacy served Bernard’s ends, and he accordingly behaved as if the pope was in his pocket. No request was laid, no appeal lodged before Innocent II. He was told, in plain terms, that “we have in France a new theologian, transformed from an old master” with a record of recidivism. “Acting frivolously, from earliest youth, in the art of dialectic, he now acts crazily when dealing with holy scripture, attemping to revive dogmas, both his own and those of others, which have long been condemned and forgotten, while adding new ones for good measure”215 Transposing into emotive prose William’s morose insistence that Abelard was recurring to a position condemned in 1121, Bernard’s grandiloquence swept aside any notion of the permissibility of error. Mistakes might be forgiven, misunderstandings resolved, but pertinacia was heretical. Reason, the suspect’s ploy, presented the next target for deconstruction. Abelard was (in a malicious allusion to 1 Peter 3:15) “prepared to give a reason for everything.” Everything included “those matters beyond and contrary to reason, and opposed to the faith.” When Bernard then asked, “What could be more against reason than to attempt to transcend it rationally?” he was evoking the distinction between ratio and right. Rightness perserved a sense of limitation, an understanding that matters inaccessible to reason could, and should, be believed. To deny this meant to hold opinions “opposed to the faith.”216 Attributing to Abelard a position he had 213

On Nicholas, see Constable in Letters of Peter the Venerable 2, pp. 316ff. Cf. Jolivet: “Entre l’ éclatante afﬁrmation spirituelle et la chicane, il resterait une place pour l’ examen des idées: dans les textes de saint Bernard . . . cette place reste vide.” “Critiques de la théologie d’ Abelard,” p. 42. 215 Ep. 190, p. 17,17–20: “Habemus in Francia novum de veteri magistro theologum, qui ab ineunte aetate sua in arte dialectica lusit, et nunc in scripturis sanctis insanit. Olim damnata et sopita dogmata—tam sua videlicet quam aliena—suscitare conatur, insuper et nova addit.” 216 “‘Nescio’ nescire dignatur: ponit in caelum os suum et scrutatur alta Dei, rediensque ad nos refert verba ineffabilia, quae non licet homini loqui; et dum paratus est de omnibus reddere rationem, etiam quae sunt supra rationem, et contra rationem praesumit et contra 214

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never assumed, while urging against him a view with which he would not have quarreled, Bernard trapped his victim in a quandary, from which argument offered no escape. Eloquence, brushing aside reason, evoked a higher righteousness in the simple act of faith. On the lower level occupied by the mistaken “rationalist,” these mysterious truths were obscured by the urge to deﬁnition. “Our Theologian,” as Bernard described the target of his attack, “posits degrees in the relationship [of the members of] the trinity, limits to its majesty, measures for eternity”:217 Wisdom 11:21 provided the measure of Abelard’s presumption, and biblical authority sufﬁced for a prosecutor seeking to caricature the views of the accused. For the theological details of the case, Bernard relied on William of SaintThierry, to whom the ﬁrst draft was submitted. Clarifying points of doctrine and adding scriptural references, William understood his ally’s purpose when he suggested the pun, incorporated into the second version, on Abelard’s theologia and stultilogia.218 The brilliant theologian was to be cast as a fool. Ironically described as noster at the beginning of the letter, he should be perceived as alien. Parallelism suggested opposition, an essential element in Bernard’s technique of creating animus from familiarity. That animus was all the deeper because heresy, as attributed to Abelard, represented the diseased twin of orthodoxy. Linked to one another through a process of inversion, the bond between this cankered couple should be severed by the pope. Countering thesis with antithesis, Ep. 190 foreshadowes the argumentative strategy of Bernard’s De consideratione.219 The effect at which he aimed was satirical, but the satire was meant in earnest, rejecting the very premises of argument by analogy: According to your similitudo, by a line of analogy like the one previously quoted, you wish to establish that the being of the Son entails that of the Father: i.e., that He who is the Son be the Father rather than the reverse. If you say this, you are a heretic; if not: vacat similitudo.220

The point here was not just the misuse of analogy but the insinuation of its emptiness, its absurdity in the view of one who rejected the premises on

ﬁdem. Quid enim magis contra rationem quam ratione rationem conari transcendere? Et quid magis contra ﬁdem quam credere nolle quidquid non possit ratione attingere?” Ibid., p.18, 1– 6. 217 “ponit in Trinitate gradus, in maiestate modos, numeros in aeternitate.” Ibid., p. 18,19–20. 218 Leclercq, “Les Formes successives de la lettre-traité,” p. 276. 219 See below, pp. 146ff. Cf. E. J. Kennan, “Antithesis and Argument in De consideratione,” in Bernard of Clairvaux, pp. 91–110 (where this precedent is not drawn). 220 Ep. 190 in Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8, p. 23,6 – 9.

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which such similitudines were constructed. The proposition, never advanced by Abelard, takes the form of an answer in a debate. What Bernard had eschewed at Sens is evoked in his letter, couched as an appearance by an advocate before the court of Rome. Decorum enjoined courtesy, and the orator followed the rules. They, however, did not inhibit his ﬂow. Obeisance professed to Innocent’s ofﬁce, Bernard deferred not a jot to his judgment or intelligence. He told the pope what to think: Is he not more Arian than Arius? Who would put up with this? Who would not close his ears to these sacrilegious words? Who would not recoil in horror at these profane novelties of diction and sense? He even says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, but in no way derives from the substance of the Father and the Son. On what grounds then? Perhaps ex nihilo, like all created things? For the apostle does not hesitate to say that they are from God, nor does he fear to afﬁrm: “By whom [are] all things ‘’ [1 Corinthians 8:6]. What then? We shall say that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Father and Son in any other way than everything else, (i.e.), not by essence but by creation.”221

Id est non essentialiter, sed creabiliter: the technical vocabulary of the schools, so foreign to Bernard’s earlier writings, makes its stylistic debut here. Like a work by one of the schoolmen whom their critic viewed with such suspicion, the form of his letter consists in questions and replies—in propositions, deﬁnitions, and counterdeﬁnitions—reminiscent of the disputationes practiced at Paris. Barren of humor, the technique was fertile of sarcasm; for the mock-professor wished to demonstrate, in a spoof of the scholars’ procedures, that all they professed was inept: I marvel at this man of insight and learning—as he seems to himself—at the way in which he declares that the Holy Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and the Son, while denying that it proceeds from the substance of Father and Son. Unless by chance he wishes them to proceed from the Holy Spirit, which would be an unheard of and unspeakable thing.222

221 “Nonne plus quam Arius hic? Quis haec ferat? Quis non claudat aures ad voces sacrilegas? Quis non horreat profanas novitates et vocum et sensuum? Dicit etiam Spiritum Sanctum procedere quidem ex Patre et Filio, sed minime de Patris esse Filiive substantia. Unde ergo? An forte ex nihilo, sicut et universa quae facta sunt? Nam et ipsa ex Deo esse non difﬁtetur apostolus, nec veretur dicere: Ex quo omnia. Quid igitur? Dicemus ex Patre et Filio Spiritum Sanctum non alio prorsus procedere modo quam omnia, id est non essentialiter, sed creabiliter.” Ep.190, p. 18,24 –25; p. 19,1– 5. 222 Ibid., p. 19, 15 –18: “Miror autem hominem acutum et sciolum, ut quidem sibi ipse videtur, quomodo cum Spiritum Sanctum fateatur Patri et Filio consubstantialem, neget tamen ex Patris Filiique prodire substantia. Nisi forte illos ex ipsius procedere velit, quod quidem inauditum est et nefandum.”

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Substantia and consubstantialis: in the accusation of ignorance and conceit lurks an echo of the prigishness with which Abelard had once lectured his present adversary on the variant supersubstantialis in the Lord’s prayer.223 Now the tables were turned, and no tactic was too low, no imputation too absurd to repay him in kind. Bernard’s inauditum et infandum attributed to the accused a position of which he had indeed neither heard nor spoken. That is why, when Abelard in his Apologia objected that views had been ascribed to him which were refutable neither by reason nor by authority, he both saw his accuser’s point and missed it. Theology provided only the surface of the debate. Less the content than the form of a disputation was employed by Bernard to suggest how, by the misuse of ratio, Abelard had exceeded the limits of reason. If insania distinguished this dubious “rationalist” and pseudo-scholar, how then to tell hypothetical from real heresy? The thrust of the abbot’s polemic was to make such a distinction impossible. Saint Jerome, one of Abelard’s favorite theologians, demonstrated, by Bernard’s command of the church fathers, that his enemy was “not a disputant, but demented.”224 Disputatio, as burlesqued by the inquisitor, was accordingly transformed from a vehicle of argument into one of accusation. Unlicensed imagination and unwarranted assumptions; ignorance, incompetence, inconsequentiality:225 with this volley of abuse borrowed from Abelard’s own invective, Bernard sought not only to discredit his opponent’s competence as a theologian, but also to put him in the position into which he had driven Roscelin.226 “But let us wait and see how speculatively (quam theorice) Our Theologian contemplates the invisible [attributes] of God.”227 Groundlessness in argument was matched by verbosity of style. Inanis multiplicitas verborum228 —the emptiness and vagueness frequently criticized by Abelard— were betrayed by his own words.229 With the innuendo that, for him, faith was a matter of opinion230 is contrasted the afﬁrmation: “I know, for I am not confused.”231 Certainty pervades Bernard’s style. Never truly interrogative, each of his questions carries afﬁrmative force. Feigning to enter into discussion with Abelard, this master of casuistry manipulated the evidence with all the agility of a sophist in the schools. Pretending to excuse 223

See above, p. 84. Ep. 190, p. 20,7–15. 225 Ibid., p. 21,20 –21. 226 See above, p. 66. 227 Ep. 190, p. 22,20 –21. 228 Ibid., p. 23,11–12. 229 Ibid., p. 24,26. 230 Ibid., p. 25,12–13. 231 Ibid., p. 25,17. 224

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his “omissions” on grounds of brevity, Bernard then asserted that the errors he went on to list, in the summary form of capitula, did not require analysis, “for they are so obvious that they can easily be refuted even in terms of common faith” (ipsa etiam vulgata ﬁde facile refellantur).232 “Common faith”—the belief of the simplices which both of their selfappointed guardians, Bernard and Abelard, claimed to defend—is never considered in this letter. Its aim was to demonstrate that, in his own terms (twisted and distorted), the “pseudo-dialectician,” like those whom he had denounced, was out of his depth and mind. Abelard’s treatment was to be exemplary. Bernard’s letter was intended to serve as a model. 116 codices, a quarter of them from the twelfth century, license, in view of this text’s diffusion, the term propaganda.233 Propaganda not conﬁned to the Cistercian order, but also directed at the schools, for a dialectic different from, but related to, that practiced at Paris now linked the master of that subject to its critic. Stultus Bernardus, with the coarse satire of stultiloquia and the sarcastic irony of noster Theologus, inverted his own image of humility,234 projected it onto his arrogant opponent, and took his place. The proud humbled and the lowly exalted, the true magister had demoted his rival to the rank of an incompetent fraud. It only remained for that lesser authority, the pope, to conﬁrm a judgment already passed. Acknowledging Bernard’s intervention, Innocent II’s reply235 was directed to the archbishops of Sens and Reims. If the pope’s salutatio included the abbot of Clairvaux, his sentence was delivered at the ofﬁcial level of the Roman pontiff communicating with his French colleagues. They too, writing to Innocent,236 had dealt summarily with doctrinal issues and emphasized the problem of Abelard’s inﬂuence. With the legitimate auctoritas of Peter at Rome they contrasted the authority usurped by the other Peter in France. “On the highways and byways”—not only in the schools to advanced students—but also among the young, the simple, and the stupid, Abelard’s teachings on the trinity had spread like a disease.237 Reprimand had not served. The heretic’s impact was pernicious. Only when the episcopate hesitated to provoke a controversy had the abbot of Clairvaux stepped in.238 232

Ibid., p. 38,23 –24. Leclercq, “Les Formes successives de la lettre-traité,” pp. 266 –71. 234 Cf. M. Diers, Bernhard von Clairvaux. Elitäre Frömmigkeit und begnadetes Wirken (Münster, 1991), pp. 198ff. and Leclercq, Etudes 5, pp. 350ff. 235 Ep. 194, in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, pp. 46– 48. 236 Leclercq, ed., “La Lettre des évêques de France au sujet d’Abélard,” in Recueil d’études sur saint Bernard 4, pp. 337– 41. 237 Ibid., p. 338,28ff. 238 Ibid, p. 340,73ff. 233

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Bernard, according to the archbishops, had warned both Abelard and his pupils. First declining the challenge to a public debate, the abbot had then accepted it, offering the accused the opportunity either to deny his authorship of the suspect writings or to correct them.239 A fair hearing had been offered, the judges were unbiased. Bernard’s case was based on Saint Augustine and other orthodox fathers. If Abelard had been condemned, it was his own fault. By appealing to Rome he had displayed deceit and subterfuge. The clear victor in theological dispute, Bernard had argued, impeccably, in a canonical context. The aim was thus not only to extirpate heresy and prevent its diffusion, but to deﬁne the limits of debate. Alarmed at Abelard’s popularity and damning his presumption, the French episcopate acknowledged Bernard’s singulare magisterium. He, champion of orthodoxy, had remained within the conﬁnes of the clergy. Abelard, “publicly” diffusing his doctrines, had placed himself beyond them. That was the chief ground given by Innocent II for his sentence. After afﬁrming apostolic primacy, he traced the history of such interventions. None of the examples that the pope cited—Nicaea and Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon, among others—referred to papal action. The regulation of heresy by synods in the ancient church offered precedents for the council of Sens; and the enactment that the pope quoted in support of his own decision was that of the emperor Marcian decreeing that “if a cleric should presume publicly to deal with religious matters, he shall be removed from the fellowship of the clergy.”240 Marcian, “although a layman,” had identiﬁed a transgression that was being formulated, with mounting concern, in canon law. Gratian, in his contemporary Decretals, re-emphasized the distinctness of the clergy.241 The profane sphere occupied by the laity was to be kept separate242 and the authority of the pontiﬁces should prevail over the learning of divinarum scripturarum tractatores.243 Abelard was to be condemned tamquam hereticus. The appearance and suspicion of heresy in the case of Bernard’s adversary, as in that of Master Eckhart,244 sufﬁced. No more precise deﬁnition was offered, no further justiﬁcation required. The inquisitor had succeeded in creating a climate in which sentence could be passed without questions being asked. What a heretic might be, Bernard had determined. Debate 239

Ep. 194 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 47,4ff. Ibid., p. 47,10 –19. For the source see J. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio 8 (Florence, 1762), p. 475. 241 Cf. Causa 11,1,9;39. See above, p. 00. 242 E.g., id., Causa 11,1,42; Distinctio 8,2,5. 243 See J. van Laarhoven, “Magisterium en theologie in de 12e eeuw. De processen te Soissons (1121), Sens (1140), en Reims (1148),” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 21 (1981), pp. 109 – 31, esp. 130 and n. 88. 244 Cf. W. Trusen, Der Prozess gegen Meister Eckhart, Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Folgen (Paderborn, 1988), pp. 182– 83. 240

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was alien to his peremptory nature, discussion excluded by his authoritarian persona. Although formally no more than a provincial abbot, he had taken on Abelard at the highest levels and he had won. Yet the victory had been achieved at a price. Bernard is sometimes portrayed as a rocklike ﬁgure, with a personality formed early and subsequently immovable.245 Not for nothing was Pope Pius V compared, in his intransigence toward heresy, with the abbot of Clairvaux.246 Yet there was a difference between the patron saint of the Roman Inquisition and his role model. Bernard’s standing derived less from his place in the hierarchy than from charisma and inﬂuence. More sensitive to the ambiguity of his position than is sometimes allowed, he changed after 1140, under the impact of the confrontation with Abelard. And the evolution of his approach, during the fourth decade of the twelfth century, can be traced by comparing his treatments of scholars and of rabble-rousers such as Henry “of Lausanne.”247 Henry was the type of heretic whom Bernard was well ﬁtted to trounce. Dispatched in 1145 to the Languedoc with a papal legate, Cardinal Alberic of Ostia, on what was tantamount to an inquisitorial mission, he took care to enlist the cooperation of the secular powers that he sought to alarm.248 A renegade Cistercian novice, Henry “of Lausanne” undermined the status and hindered the work of the clergy. He emptied churches, incited the populace to rebellion, fornicated with married women and whores. Immorality, a cliché of the genre of denunciation, added spice, but not substance, to the central issue: Henry was a leader with a following, a heresiarch who represented an alternative to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.249 Reasoned arguments, against this seducer of the gullible plebs, were thus of little avail. Action was needed, and there Bernard excelled. Miraculous healings, eloquent sermons, diplomatic negotiations undermined the basis of Henry’s support. These tactics, although temporarily effective, hardly produced sophisticated theology. At Albi, the heresiarch’s victims, in245

D. Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge,1963), p. 34. G. Catena, Vita del gloriosissimo papa Pio Quinto (Rome, 1587), p. 4. 247 Cf. R. Manselli, Studi sulle eresie del secolo xii, 2 ed. (Rome, 1975), pp. 93 –110 and cf. J. Leclercq, “L’Hérésie d’après les écrits de Saint Bernard de Clairvaux,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (11th–13th Century), ed. W. Lourdaux (Louvain, 1976), pp. 12– 26. 248 Ep. 241 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 127, 11–15. Cf. L. Kolmer, Ad capiendas vulpes. Die Ketzerbekämpfung in Südfrankreich in der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts und die Ausbildung des Inquisitionsverfahrens, Pariser Historische Studien 19 (Bonn, 1982), pp. 9–11, 24ff. 249 See C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy, The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), p. 341 and, for context, cf. J. Nelson, “Society, Theodicy, and the Origins of Medieval Heresy,” Studies in Church History 9 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 113 – 33. 246

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formed of his errors, were invited to signify their return to the Catholic fold by raising their right hands to heaven.250 No questions were asked about the substance or detail of what they now believed. At this level—of compelling rhetoric and striking deeds—Bernard was a matchless hunter of heretics. It was when he was confronted with the intellectuals that he stalked his prey with less assurance. Tradition offered him a weapon he was slow to use. “Philosophers,” in the extended sense of “thinkers,” as the founders of heresy was a theory formulated in the patristic period251 and revived, within living memory, by Anselm of Canterbury’s equation of dialectici and heretici.252 Bernard began from a different position, which altered with time. The chronology of his changing attitude to the link between learning and doctrinal error repays attention, for the public pronouncements of his datable sermons reveal, in conﬂict with approaches alien to his own, a notable development. In 1138–39 Bernard preached on knowledge and ignorance. “Even the liberal arts,” so highly regarded by others, did not guarantee salvation.253 The apostles were not recruited from the schools of rhetors and philosophers; there is a wisdom that passes the ken of this world. No, it was not that Bernard wished to repress scholarship, censor the erudite, or ban the study of literature. They all served a purpose—deﬁned as “either refuting adversaries or instructing the simple,” even if scientia inﬂat. Religious polemic and education were permitted but, to inquiry or analysis or speculation, no quarter was given. Aware that he lived in a culture that was beginning to place a premium on learned churchmen, Bernard mocked the standards by which they were estimated. Simple faith, based on a straightforward reading of scripture,254 provided his measure of what might and should be known—a far cry from the position that he assumed a handful of years later, after the condemnation of Abelard at Sens and during the unrest caused by the Cathars at Cologne.255 Heretics, allegorically interpreted as the foxes of Song of Songs 2:15, were to be captured “not by arms, but by arguments,” Bernard then de250 See Geoffrey of Auxerre, Epistola de miraculis in itinere Germanico peractis, PL 185, col. 414. 251 See G. Verbeke, “Philosophy and Heresy,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages, pp. 72–97. 252 See above, p. 66. 253 Sermo 36 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, ed. J. Lerclercq, C. H. Talbot, H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1958), pp. 3ff. Cf. T. Renna, “St. Bernard and the Pagan Classics: An Historical View,” in The Chimaera of His Age. Studies on Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. E. R. Elder and J. R. Sommer, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 5 (Kalamazoo, 1980), pp. 122– 31. 254 See G. R. Evans, The Mind of Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford, 1983), p. 49. 255 Cf. Moore, Origins of European Dissent, pp. 168ff. and R. Manselli, L’eresia del male, 2nd ed. (Morano, 1980), pp. 179ff.

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sermon.256

clared in his sixty-fourth True conversion had become his objective, not just a symbolic raising of hands. Signaling his own conversion to an intellectual mode of heretic-hunting, he now measured his opponents against the scholars. The extirpator of error, as deﬁned in Sermo 64, “clearly and openly distinguishes what is probable from what is true, demonstrating that dubious teachings are corrupt by plain and irrefutable reasoning.”257 Clarity as opposed to obscurity, truth versus probability, lucid argument: these criteria are the opposite of the arcaneness, the skepticism, and the relativism Bernard had attributed to Abelard.258 The attack was pressed home in Sermo 65, written in response to Erewin, provost of Steinfeld, who had in 1143 asked him for aid in combating the heretics at Cologne. Misused knowledge was now the chief target of attack. Vainglory about the uniqueness of one’s learning had always been the deﬁning attribute of heresy.259 This “iniquitous mystery” operated with greater license for being concealed.260 Darkness and shadows were its natural refuge, where it performed “heinous obscenities.” The protective shroud in which the erudite Abelard had sought to veil higher scholarship from the profane herd261 was thus transformed into the nefarious covering with which the heretic sought to hide his plots. Clarity, in 1138 the abbot’s standard of simplicity and truth, ﬁve years later provided the instrument with which the arrogant deceiver was to be unmasked. Hypocrisy, which this “shrewdest of animals” employed to cover its tracks,262 was matched by equivocation, producing an appearance of righteousness that dissimulated malignity—attributed, by Bernard, not to scholars at Paris but to unlettered heretics in the Rhineland. Derided as “country-bumpkins, simpletons, and churls,”263 the Cathars posed a problem of classiﬁcation. They lacked a name, an origin, an auctor. All previous heresies had taken their titles from their founders: this one remained alarmingly anonymous. “Novelty,” symptom of error, could be cured by supplying a lineage. Assimilation to an ancient evil was the ﬁrst step in the removal of a present ill.264 Looking down on the ignorant, Bernard of 256

Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, p. 170,13. Ibid., p. 170,28 – 30, p. 171,1– 3. 258 See below, pp. 97ff. 259 “Omnibus una intentio haereticis semper fuit, captare gloriam de singularitate scientiae.” Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, p. 173,2– 3. 260 “. . . cauta est novo maleﬁcii genere operari mysterium iniquitatis, eo licentius quo latentius.” Ibid., p. 173,6 –7. 261 See above, p. 69 and cf. pp. 86–87. 262 Ibid., p. 175,23ff. 263 “Rusticani homines sunt et idiotae, et prorsus contemptibiles.” Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, p. 179,2–3. 264 See Y. Congar, “‘Ariana Haeresis’ comme désignation du néomanichésme au xiie siècle,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 43 (1959), pp. 449 – 61. 257

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Clairvaux attributed to them those crimes of ambiguity and indirectness he had previously discerned in the intellectuals whose hauteur, in and after 1140, he imitated. That is why it was shrewd, at a turning point in the controversy between Bernard and Abelard, when Thomas of Morigny entitled the work in which he contrasted their views a disputatio.265 If he recognized Abelard as a “master of great learning and fame,”266 he extolled Bernard as “a most lettered abbot and, what is more, highly religious.”267 Greater piety was complemented by the attribution of equal erudition. New in the image of Bernard, as constructed by himself and others, it indicated his appropriation of the criteria of the scholars. Abelard, described by Thomas as a “slippery Proteus,”268 released in his rival a matching capacity for metamorphosis that continued to the end of his life. More astutely than those who question his ability in dialectic or deny his potential for change, the chimaera of Clairvaux understood the need to adapt to new attitudes he might resist but could not halt. 265 N. Häring, ed., “Thomas von Morigny, Disputatio catholicorum patrum contra dogmata Petri Abailardi,” SM ser. 3a, 22 (1981), pp. 299 – 376. 266 “tam eruditum, tam celebrem magistrum.” 1,13, ibid., p. 328. 267 “abbatem litteratissimum et—quod maius est—religiosissimum vocat inexpertum artis illius, que magistra est disserendi.” 1,19, ibid., p. 329. 268 “alter Proteus lubricus.” 3, 81, ibid., p. 369.

H

H

IV SMOLDERING FIREBRANDS

A

MONG BAVARIAN BORES of the twelfth century, few were more voluble, and none more insistent, than Gerhoch of Reichersberg.1 The province of Passau, where he spent thirty-seven years imprecating against the evils of his times, did not offer the audience that this selfappointed prophet aspired to reach. He issued his message to the wider world, which generally ignored or rejected it. Pope after pope; cardinals and archbishops; saints, emperors, and kings: all of them were browbeaten by the would-be reformer. To little avail. Even Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom he detected a kindred spirit, turned a deaf ear to Gerhoch. Snubbed, tried for heresy, and exiled, the provost of Reichersberg never yielded. He was convinced that he had identiﬁed, and could remedy, the maladies of his age, among which he counted a misplaced yearning for intellectual leadership. Impressionable students, turning “from the truth to ﬁction,” had ﬂocked by the drove to “masters with pricking ears.” They should be “humbled before the mystery of the Lord’s cross.”2 If the sin of curiosity (“pricking ears”) blinded these dupes to the truth that “a wiser man knows nothing but Jesus Christ and his cruciﬁxion,”3 Gerhoch, judged by his own criteria, was not wise. His ample if eccentric learning embraced both scripture and the patristic tradition, together with more recent products of scholasticism. Scholastice—ecclesiastice: in that antithesis lay the difference, for Gerhoch profound and unbridgeable, between “the schools of France” and what he deﬁned as “the Roman church.” No matter that he directed his criticism against the majority of the clergy and many of the bishops or that, in his eagerness to win the favor of the curia, he succeeded only in alienating its members with a mixture of tactlessness and vehemence.4 Slow to recognize the many enemies he made 1

See P. Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg. Eine Biographie (Wiesbaden, 1960). “eos, qui a veritate auditum avertentes ad fabulas autem conversi coacervant sibi magistros prurientes auribus, humiliandos esse sub misterium crucis dominice.” De novitatibus huius temporis 42,1, in Gerhoch of Reichersberg, Letter to Pope Hadrian about the Novelties of the Day, ed. N. M. Häring (Toronto, 1974), p. 106, 62– 64. 3 Ibid., p. 106, 68 – 69. 4 See Classen, Gerhoch, p. 321 and id., “Der Häresie-Begriff bei Gerhoch von Reichersberg und in seinem Umkreis,” in The Concept of Heresy, pp. 27– 41, esp. 39 [ ⫽ id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. J. Fleckenstein with C. J. Classen and J. Fried (Sigmaringen, 1983), pp. 461–73, esp. 471]. All following references are to the selected essays. 2

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in the clerical establishment, Gerhoch was swift to condemn the foes outside it whom he took to be legion: those “massed hordes of magistri, through whose teaching the church is not illuminated but many a school, in France and in other countries, sends up smoke.” The chief culprits, with their all too numerous pupils, were Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers— “two tails of smoldering ﬁrebrands” (Isaiah 7:4) that reeked of the stake.5 The works of Peter and Gilbert were diffused in Germany during Gerhoch’s lifetime.6 These “masters of France,” in the opinion of their critic, represented a counter-authority to that of the church. Their writings counted among the most glaring “novelties of the day” described in the tract of that title Gerhoch addressed to Pope Hadrian IV in 1155–56. Recurring to his familiar theme of heresy, the embattled provost had lost none of the zeal that ﬁred his earlier denunciations, but he now adopted what, for him, was a more temperate tone and a more scrupulous method, assembling evidence and marshaling arguments to buttress his case. Once swift to condemn others as heretics, Gerhoch himself had been arraigned, twenty-ﬁve years earlier, on the same charge. Sentenced then to a silence he did not observe, he learned later the lesson taught him by the experience of others: of Abelard tried and found guilty, in 1121 and 1140, at Soissons and Sens, and of Gilbert of Poitiers, acquitted at Reims in 1148. 1148 was probably the year in which Gerhoch composed his Liber contra duas hereses. An introduction to his commentary on the Psalms, it revealed that he had grasped how arbitrarily accusations of heresy could be leveled. Taking care to draw attention to the patristic sources that established the orthodoxy of opinions which “to modern readers might seem unusual,” Gerhoch sought the protection of Godfrey of Admont, abbot of Weingarten, who was invited to improve his writing where it “offended on reasonable grounds,” or return it to the author “for diligent emendation.”7 This appears to have been done. In a later version of the same work, the teachings previously damned by Gerhoch as “heresies” are prudently de5 “Ut noverint illum sapientiorem, qui nihil se scire fatebatur nisi Christum Iesum et hunc cruciﬁxum, quam coacervatos illos magistros, de quorum doctrina non fulget ecclesia sed fumant scole plures in Francia et aliis terris, permaxime a duabus caudis tictionum fumigantium: videlicet Petri Abaiolardi et episcopi Gilliberti.” De novitatibus huius temporis 42,2, p. 106, 65–71. 6 Classen, Gerhoch, pp. 91– 92; id., “Zur Geschichte der Frühscholastik in Österreich und Bayern,” in id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, pp. 279 – 306, esp. 284ff. and 289ff. 7 “Ut ergo tutus ac liber incedam in expositione Psalmorum neque timeam mihi a verbo aspero, quoniam usitatum est quibusdam importunis vocare schismaticum vel haereticum quemcunque suo sensui viderint minus consonum. Si quae forte modernis lectoribus inusitata interponentur antiquorum Patrum orthoxorum sententiis veris hinc inde cincta et scuto veritatis circumdata invenientur . . . praesens istud prooemium tuae paternae sapientiae destinatum tractatui meo in partes distincto censui anteponendum . . . hoc ipsum tibi destino, ubi placet approbandum atque, ubi rationabiliter displicet, emendandum vel mihi, ut emendetur caute, resignandum.” Liber contra duas hereses, PL 194, 1162A-B.

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“assertions.”8

scribed as Steps had been taken, by Godfrey of Admont or the writer himself, to safeguard him from his excesses. Precensorship requested with moderate motives and undertaken on rational grounds; caution before condemning as heretical opinions that modern readers might fail to recognize as derived from an authoritative source: all this is a far cry from the haste and fury of Gerhoch’s earlier polemic.9 The author’s request for examination of his work, prior to its publication, points to the direction in which others were to follow—foreshadowing the practice of Ralph Niger in the last decade of the century and the defense, recorded by William Ockham, of Joachim of Fiore on the grounds that his writings had undergone censura praevia.10 Gilbert of Poitiers had not been condemned by Eugenius III, the only pope who had attended to the provost of Reichersberg;11 and the ruling in that cause célèbre gave pause to hotheads like Gerhoch. A different style and a more circumspect approach consequently inform the tract on modern novelties which he dedicated to Hadrian IV. Citing the works he had addressed to the pope’s predecessors,12 the reformer hesitated to place himself on the wrong side of Rome. Realizing that the equation of dialectici with heretics was losing its force,13 Gerhoch, in the manner of Bernard or Abelard, deferred to Saint Paul and acknowledged that heresy stood in a dialectical relationship to orthodoxy.14 The goal of truth was to be reached by the route of debate, and Gilbert’s views are consequently quoted with a thoroughness unprecedented in the many muddled pronouncements of the Bavarian Jeremiah. For Gerhoch of Reichersberg, as for Bernard of Clairvaux, the pace of intellectual change had been accelerated by the debate about heresy that followed Abelard’s condemnation in 1141. Indignant at his treatment, pupils and colleagues expressed, in their criticisms of Bernard, tensions that came to a head after Sens. Neither unanimously applauded nor acknowledged, by all his contemporaries, as a leading ﬁgure in the church,15 Bernard of Clairvaux had raised fundamental questions about ecclesiastical authority and the methods, institutional and 8

Cf. Classen, Gerhoch, pp. 125ff., 416ff., and id., “Der Häresie-Begriff,” p. 469. Classen, Gerhoch, p. 55. 10 See above, p. 11 and n. 36 and cf. J. Koch, “Philosophische und theologische Irrtumslisten von 1270–1329. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung der theologischen Zensuren,” in id., Kleine Schriften 2 (Rome, 1973), pp. 423– 30. On Ockham and Joachim of Fiore, see W. Trusen, Der Prozeß gegen Meister Eckhart: Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Folgen (Paderborn, 1988), pp. 177–78. 11 Classen, Gerhoch, pp. 128 –140. 12 E.g., De novitatibus huius temporis 4,8, p. 32, 95ff.; 4,18, p. 34, 62ff. Cf. 19,4, p. 73, 59ff. and 30,2, p. 91, 67ff. 13 Ibid., 4,30, p. 37, 64. 14 Ibid., 4,10, p. 32, 11–16. See further below, p. 00. 15 Cf. P. Phillips, OCSO, “The Presence—and Absence—of Bernard of Clairvaux in the Twelfth-Century Chronicles,” in Cîteaux. Commentarii Cistercienses 42 (1991), pp. 35– 53. 9

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interpretative, that should be applied to answer them. But he had done so with a contentiousness that called for a response. It came promptly, in the same combative spirit, from Berengar of Poitiers.16 When Berengar, defending the orthodoxy of his teacher, declared that “God is common [to all], not private property,”17 he was both ironizing Bernard’s distinction between the faith of the elect and vulgata ﬁdes 18 and challenging the basis of his auctoritas. This position was not isolated. Wulfric of Hazelburg, according to the Cistercian author of his Life, said the same.19 But Wulfric, indignant at Bernard’s strategems, did not put his ﬁnger so precisely as Berengar on the weakness of the prosecution’s case. It delivered the material for the attack and determined the manner in which it would be conducted. That is why the polemic employed by Bernard in Ep. 190 is reﬂected in the mirror image of Berengar’s Apology. Trained in ﬁctive declamation, Berengar seized the opportunity to compose a real one. Imaginary cases once argued in the classroom now equiped him to plead before the tribunal of public opinion. Bernard, declared Abelard’s advocate, had “throttled” his teacher’s “voice without a hearing.” Audacia had marked the inquisitor’s case. Boldness, ruthlessness, or presumption? Berengar, playing on the polysemy of the word, inclined to its less ﬂattering senses. In literature, theology, and faith, he might compete with Bernard—but not in sanctity. Tribute to the holiness of his opponent insinuating the opposite, Berengar distinguished between the various parts of the abbot’s complex persona.20 Acceptable as monk and moralist, but not as a thinker or writer, the opponent of Abelard was advised to cultivate that silentium which he praised as an attribute of the just (Isaiah 32:17).21 In his desire to be seen as the arbiter of orthodoxy, he failed to recall that 16 See R. M. Thomson, “The Satirical Works of Berengar of Poitiers,” MS 42 (1980), pp. 89–138. Cf. D. Luscombe, The School of Abelard: The Inﬂuence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 29 – 49. 17 Thompson, ed., “The Satirical Works,” p. 117. 18 See above, p. 107. 19 See Constable, Reformation, p. 31 and n. 143. 20 “Damnaverat Abaelardum praeceptorem meum, virum ﬁdei bucinam, legis armarium, in via morum pede regio gradientem. Damnaverat, inquam, Abaelardum, et vocem eius sine audientia strangulaverat. Eram ea tempestate adulescens, nondumque inpuberes malas nubes lanuginis adumbrabat, eratque mihi velut scholastico animus inﬁcta crebro materia declamare. Porro veri certaminis arridente vena, pectus appuli, ut purgarem Abaelardum abbatisque confutarem audaciam. ‘Sed non’, inquit, ‘a te tali talem argui oportebat. Tu enim bestia es, et montem tangere non debes.’ Parcius ista, fratres. Mementote vos obiicere viro. In quo audet abbas? Audet in litteris, audeo et ego. Audet in theologicis, audeo et ego. Audet in ﬁde, audeo et ego. Audet in sanctitate, hic non audeo ego. Quid ergo peccavi, si ﬁdelis ﬁdelem, minor maiorem, saecularis religiosum redargui? Momordi, fateor, non contemplativum, sed philosophum; non confessorem, sed scriptorem; non mentem, sed linguam; non praecordia, sed stylum; non meditationes viri, sed sonum.” Thompson, ed., “The Satirical Works,” p. 135. 21 Ibid., p. 132.

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man,22

he too was a prone to human fraility and error. Condemning the “monk without a rule,” implied Berengar, Bernard had forgotten that he was his enemy’s other self. The utterances of the abbot of Clairvaux, despite his ignorance of the liberal arts, “covered the face of the earth.”23 If self-publicity had made Abelard suspect, his adversary was open to the same charge. Bernard pronounced on theology with the wilfullness of an interpolator and the triviality of a fool. Untrained in the subjects on which he was laying down the law, at Sens he had proceeded, with his inebriated allies, to postprandial damnation.24 This travesty of a trial was followed by letters to the pope composed in a bellicose spirit unsuited to a man of God.25 Documents had been fabricated, arguments contrived; and at this point—conveniently for the defendant, irritatingly for the prosecutor—Berengar cited the “Confessio ad Heloisam,”26 a testimony to Abelard’s piety so much better written, in his highly imitable style, than the Apologia and the Confessio ﬁdei “universis,” that its authenticity must be doubted. Berengar was just as unscrupulous as Bernard himself. Inventing quotations from his opponent’s works in order to pour scorn on them,27 he twisted the evidence when it suited the occasion. Probability, not truth; verismilitude rather than authenticity: if these were the criteria of the school declamations that had prepared Berengar for writing the Apologia,28 they were also the standards that informed the letters Bernard had addressed to the pope. Accusing the abbot of ignorance, of banality, of exaggerated sentiments and wordy style,29 Berengar projected onto the accuser the charges he had leveled against his victim. The ambivalence of heresy—its tendency to rebound on those who abused it—was underlined in criticisms of Bernard’s deviation from the path of true doctrine onto the “rocky crags of the philosophers”30 and, above all, his assumption of the censor’s role.31 An archimandrite and a peasant,32 both a judge and a pro22

“Nonne abbas homo est?” Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 111. 24 Ibid., p. 114. 25 Ibid., p. 117. 26 Ibid., pp. 117–18. Cf. C. Burnett, “Confessio ﬁdei ad Heloisam: Abelard’s last Letter to Heloise? A Discussion and Critical Edition of the Latin and Medieval French Versions,” MlJb 21 (1986), pp. 147– 55. 27 Thompson, “The Satirical Works,” p. 102 and n. 60 and P. von Moos, Consolatio 1, Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliteratur über den Tod und zum Problem der christlichen Tranes (Munich, 1971), pp. 329ff. 28 See above, p. 110. 29 Thompson, ed., “The Satirical Works,” p. 123. 30 Ibid., pp. 121,126. 31 Ibid., pp. 118,121. 32 Ibid., p. 126. 23

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sects,33

moter of the fanatic was unaware of the paradoxes of his position. One of them was hammered home, as Abelard’s student demonstrated how the would-be saint might be made to appear a heretic. In a satirical spirit faithful to Bernard’s own, Berengar showed that the monk playing the inquisitor was, and deserved, a caricature.34 The standards of the scholars that the abbot of Clairvaux had mocked in his attack on Abelard provided the measure of his own insufﬁciency. Both sides were speaking the same language; both addressed the same issue; but neither Bernard nor Berengar offered as clear a solution to the problem of ecclesiastical authority as did Peter the Venerable in his tract against the Petrobrusians,35 composed between 1139 and 1141,36 while the controversy about Abelard still raged. Contra Petrobrusianos is prefaced by a letter to the archbishops of Arles and Embrun and the bishops of Die and Gap, who are addressed in the following terms: It is therefore your duty to drive the heretics out from those hiding places that they have gleefully found, both by preaching and even, if necessary, by enlisting the armed force of laymen, for in those regions you, I declare, have special responsibility for God’s church, which leans on you like strong pillars, on account of your ofﬁce and your singular knowledge.37

Inconceivable from the pen of Abelard, critic of the episcopal ofﬁce, this sentence sums up essential points of the conﬂict that, at the time Peter the Venerable wrote, divided his namesake from the hierarchy that proscribed him. The context, for both Peters, was similar. Abelard, in Theologia “scholarium,” had attacked the Petrobrusian heresiarch, before assailing his fellow magistri. But he had done so on his own authority, as an expression of what William of Saint-Thierry called his singulare magisterium. When 33

Ibid., p. 128. Cf. J. Berlioz, “Saint Bernard dans la littérature satirique, de l’Ysengrimus aux Balivernes des courtisans,” in Vies et légendes de Saint Bernard. Création, diffusion, réception (xiie – xx e siècles), Commentarii Cistercienses (Cîteaux, 1993), pp. 211–28. 35 Petri Venerabilis Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, ed. J. Fearns, CCCM 10 (Turnhout, 1968) with Fearns, “Peter von Bruis und der religiöse Bewegung des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 48 (1966), pp. 311–25. Cf. J. Châtillon, “Pierre le Vénérable et les Pétrobrusiens,” in id., D’ Isidore de Séville à saint Thomas d’ Aquin (London, 1985), pp. 165–76. 36 See Constable, ed., Letters of Peter the Venerable 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 285– 88 with Fearns, ed., Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, CCCM 10 (Turnhout, 1968), p. xiii. 37 “Vestrum est igitur, ad quos precipue tam ex ofﬁcio quam ex singulari scientia in partibus illis cura ecclesie Dei spectat et quibus ipsa velut fortibus columpnis maxime innititur— vestrum est, inquam, et a locis illis, in quibus se latibula invenisse gaudet, et predicatione et etiam, si necesse fuerit, vi armata per laicos exturbare.” Contra Petrobrusianos, p. 3, 1,20 –25. 34

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Peter the Venerable censured the Petrobrusians, he did not assert his personal status but appealed to the ofﬁcium of the bishops. Unlike himself and Abelard, the higher ranks of the secular clergy had a right and an obligation to intervene. Possessed of singularis scientia, they were equipped to lead the campaign against heresy. Knowledge and expertise that Abelard seemed, to his critics, to monopolize, were attributed by Peter the Venerable to the episcopal ofﬁce. The one Peter delivered sentences like a judge; the other offered advice as a counselor. If Abelard’s claims made him susceptible to attack, Peter cautiously submitted the Contra Petrobrusianos for correction to the bishops.38 Like William of Saint-Thierry and the theologian whom he had attacked, the abbot of Cluny registered with alarm that the church was menaced from outside and divided within.39 Remembering the dissension caused by Berengar of Tours,40 Peter aimed to restore unity by an appeal to tradition41 based on arguments cast in the form of a debate that ﬁnds parallels in his Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem.42 Although the Petrobrusians could be derived from a mixed lineage of ancient heresies, they stood out for the uniqueness of their errors. Did not even the pagans—in particular, their philosophers—acknowledge the excellence of the apostolic epistles?43 In the struggle for the sacred texts that the heretics were seeking to appropriate, Peter emphasized their isolation. Against the mainstream of the movement constitued by reason and authority,44 the Petrobrusians amounted to no more than a deviant trickle.45 Outside the community of faith, opposed to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, maintaining beliefs that ranged from denial of infant baptism to scorn for the rituals of worship, these dissidents held views that were patently different from those of Abelard. Yet if it would be mistaken to derive the tenets of their sect from his theology,46 it is not idle to reﬂect on why, to some, Peter Abelard and Peter of Bruis seemed two sides of the same coin. In the wake of a schism, amid widespread concern about other heretical movements, each of them was taken to stand for a dubious individualism with antiestablishment features. That parallel, neither exact nor fair, was demolished by Peter the Venerable when he did Abelard that double favor 38

Ibid., p. 6, 10,18 –23 and cf. p. 165, 278,33 – 49. Ibid., p. 127, 212,15 –17. 40 Ibid., p. 87, 153,1–p. 88,1–29. 41 Ibid., p. 13, 11,1ff. 42 See Y. Friedman, ed., in Petri Venerabilis Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem, CCCM 58 (Turnhout, 1985), p. xxi. 43 Contra Petrobrusianos, p. 23, 25,2–29. 44 Ibid., p. 23, 26,1ff. and p. 25, 29,1–14. 45 Cf. J.-P. Torrell, O.P., and D. Bouthillier, Pierre le Vénérable et sa vision du monde. Sa vie—son oeuvre. L’Homme et le démon (Paris, 1986), p. 165. 46 Manselli, Studi sulle eresie del secolo xii, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1975), p. 90. 39

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of writing an open letter to Heloise that reclaimed her late husband for monasticism and of composing a tract that served to distinguish him from the Petrobrusians. Laying out the evidence for the heretic’s rehabilitation, the abbot of Cluny both readmitted him to the fold and marked its boundaries, beyond which the wolves threatening the faith were consigned to outer darkness. In the confusion of crisis, Peter the Venerable advocated lucidity. No less anxious than Bernard of Clairvaux to exert control over those who deﬁed, or appeared to defy, it, he drew a line between the formulation and the execution of policy. In the bishops to whom he addressed Contra Petrobrusianos, Peter saw the arbiters and promulgators of his work, claiming for himself only the right to interpret issues of heresy in the light of an orthodox hermeneutic. That hermeneutic is extended in the tracts which he wrote for, and against, the Jews and the Muslims, both of which Peter conceived, in a form made fashionable by Abelard, as disputationes about the sacred works of their respective religions.47 Peter’s strategy, in the Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem, was to combat the Jews with their own weapons. To him, the Old Testament represented what the writings of the philosophers and the heretics stood for in Theologia christiana and its reworkings. Like Abelard, Peter viewed himself as an exponent of clarity over the arcaneness of the text, emphasizing the plurality of meaning and stressing the importance of contextual understanding.48 The Jews, by contrast, perverted their exegesis of holy writ.49 Christ’s message should be interpreted in the true spirit of the prophets: “not per involucra but with unvarnished openness.”50 The sin committed by these “beasts” of Jews was mortal because, depraving the pure and literal sense of scripture, they “insanely” twisted it to suit their own purposes.51 The Catholic faith had preserved the tradition of God’s word intact, without addition or change. The Hebrew tradition possessed the dead letter of scripture; the Christian that which gave life: “You gnaw at the skin of the fruit; I eat its ﬂesh.”52 The ﬂesh to which Peter referred was peeled from the skin of holy writ 47 For the dating and the genre, cf. Friedman, ed., Adversus Iudeorum, pp. xxi–xxiii and lvii ff. with bibliography. See too J. Kritzeck, “De l’inﬂuence de Pierre Abélard sur Pierre le Vénérable,” in Pierre Abélard. Pierre le Vénérable. Les Courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistique en Occident au milieu du xiie siècle (Paris, 1975), pp. 205 –24. 48 “Discernit [ecclesia] similia nomina in rebus dissimilibus dissimiliter intelligenda esse, nec uno tamen vel eodem modo licet idem sonantia semper intelligi oportete. Habetis hoc in innumeris scripturarum vestrarum exemplis, habetis eadem nomina non idem semper signantia. Et quando possint haec singillatim proferri?” Adversus Iudeorum, 1, 71–75, pp. 5– 6. 49 Ibid., 1, 124ff., p. 7; 2, 139 – 41, p. 20. 50 Ibid., 2, 219 –22, p. 23. 51 Ibid., 3, 16 –18, p. 42; 3, 54 – 57, p. 43. 52 Ibid., 4, 1089 –1112, p. 99.

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by an interpreter as faithful as Abelard, and no less imaginative. The Jews, in their literalism, had fallen prey to the absurdities of fabula.53 Spiderlike, they wove a web of ﬁction, fraud, and folly.54 In this they resembled the Muslims, whose beliefs, inspired by the devil, were founded on an unholy alliance between Mohammed and the monk Sergius.55 Corrupted by Nestorius’s teachings, that apostate had hoodwinked the prophet into believing the legends of the Apocrypha. That is why the founder of Islam should be regarded as a failed Christian. Misled by Sergius, Mohammed had become a Nestorian heretic. Demonstrating all the qualities of imagination which he praised in Christian exegesis, Peter the Venerable constructed a pedigree for the Muslims which enabled him to depict them as redeemable deviants. What they now needed was a guide back to the true path from which they had strayed, and Peter attempted to enlist Bernard’s aid in Ep. 111.56 After discussing the issues which divided them, the abbot of Cluny came to one on which they might make common cause: an “intellectual crusade” against the Muslims,57 equiped with weaponry from the Christian arsenal.58 His colleague would understand that Peter, even if he lacked conﬁdence in winning over these heretics, was following the example of Augustine who, despite his failure to convert the Pelagian Julian and the Manichaean Faustus, had not omitted to write against their errors. With a plea for Bernard’s support, Peter added a request for his tract on the interpretation of the monastic rule. That subject of dispute between the Cistercians and the Cluniacs59 was to be settled by the harmonious collaboration of the two prelates, turning their attention from disputes within the church to the threats from outside it. Heresy, argued Peter the Venerable, should be combated by reasoning, not arms or intimidation; and the true targets of the assault were beyond the bounds of Christendom. Misled like the Muslims by the Nestorian Sergius, in league with the devil’s agent Mohammed, or misguided like the Jews by fabulae, they could be redeemed by the force of arguments. Such was the offer that Abelard’s defender made, in the style and spirit of that convicted heretic, to his prosecutor. 53

Ibid., 5, 1140ff., p. 158. Ibid., 5, 2170–2206, pp. 186 – 87. 55 Summa totius haeresis Saracenorum 6, in Petrus Venerabilis Schriften zum Islam, ed. R. Glei (Altenberge, 1985), p. 8 with n. 34. 56 Constable, ed., Letters 1, pp. 274 – 99. 57 The expression is J. Leclercq’s, Pierre le Vénérable (Saint-Wandrille, 1946), p. 241. Cf. M.-T. d’Alverny, “Deux traductions du Coran au Moyen Age,” AHDLM 22/23 (1947– 48), pp. 69–131, esp. 70. 58 Ep. 111 in Constable, Letters 1, p. 298. Cf. Contra sectam Saracenorum 1, 24,6 – 8 in Petrus Venerabilis Schriften zum Islam, p. 63. 59 See above, p. 8. 54

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Outﬂanked on his chosen terrain, Bernard never replied to the invitation. Forceful in action, powerful in rhetoric, and profound in spirituality, the abbot of Clairvaux was neither a scholar nor an intellectual of the stature of Peter the Venerable. To commission a translation of the Koran and write an analysis of Muslim mistakes in relation to the heresies of the ancient church was an enterprise beyond Bernard’s powers and, perhaps, alien to his interests. But if he declined the proposal in silence, that was not only because the spiritus movens of the second crusade preferred directer strategies. In surveying Peter’s writings on heresy composed, or revised, during and after the controversy of 1140–41—the letters to Heloise and to the pope, Contra Petrobrusianos, the tracts against the Jews and the Muslims—it was natural to regard them as an attempt to deﬂect attention from internal issues vexing the church to external perils. “The monk without a rule”—whether the ﬁgure of Abelard or his double—had caused a bitter conﬂict, and Peter the Venerable sought to move the debate out of the realm of ecclesiastical politics and into the sphere of ideas. There his thought was complemented by Robert of Melun’s Sententiae.60 Once Abelard’s colleague at Paris and still his critical continuator,61 Robert, in the sparkling prologue to his Sententiae, discussed many of the same questions of method and interpretation before launching into a defense of intellectual enquiry. The “puerile” fashion for recitation, or reading aloud, then current in the schools is the subject with which he begins.62 What right to a chair of learning had those famed only for their skills in repeating what had been said by others?63 Debate should not be stiﬂed; a parrot was not a teacher: claims to the ofﬁce of doctor should be grounded in rational investigation of disputed matters. Uncertainty must stimulate research, declared Robert in the spirit of Sic et non.64 From a general principle of doubt, the inquirer should descend to the particular. Those who pretended to be omniscient lacked focus and concentration.65 Enquiry has a structure, a progression, and a goal: from question to argument, from the hidden to the manifest, from interpretation to understanding.66 Robert dismissed obsession with the apparatus of learn60 On Robert, see Luscombe, School of Abelard, pp. 281– 98; R. M. Martin, O.P., “L’Oeuvre théologique de Robert de Melun,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 15 (1914 –20), pp. 456 – 90 and “Pro Petro Abaelardo. Un plaidoyer de Robert de Melun contre saint Bernard,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 12 (1923), pp. 308 – 33; and U. Horst, Die Trinitätsund Gotteslehre des Robert von Melun (Mainz, 1963). 61 See Martin, ed., Oeuvres de Robert de Melun, 3,1: Sententiae (Louvain, 1947), p. vi with Luscombe, School of Abelard, pp. 282ff. 62 Sententiae, p. 4, 20ff. 63 Ibid., p. 5,24ff - p. 6, 1–2. 64 Ibid., p. 6,2ff. 65 Ibid., p. 7,10ff. 66 Ibid., p. 9,9ff.

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magistri67 —obscurantist

ing as the narrow-mindedness of glosarum pedants who focused on the details and ignored the sententia.68 This trivial mode of reading ensnared the unwary into useless effort and pernicious error.69 The gloss had no authority; it was dependent on the text;70 and even texts by heretics might be admitted on the auctoritas of the church.71 Since contradictions were bound to arise from the diversity of terms, it was Ecclesia that should decide on what was to be normative, “authentic,” and canonical. Ecclesiastical authority, as conceived by Robert of Melun, was marked by the tolerance that derived from recognition of hermeneutic difﬁculty. A single, invariable meaning being impossible to derive from mutable language,72 plurality of interpretation was unavoidable, but accuracy could, and should, be veriﬁed. It followed, argued Robert, that philosophers’ disputes were to be valued.73 Less laudable and more dangerous was rhetoric, as Plato had proved. The trouble with the controversialists of the day was their exclusive interest in form and eloquence rather than in truth of content.74 Since truth, by the very nature of verbal expression, was intermingled with falsehood,75 it was indispensable, both for the teacher and for the student, “to descend to the elementary discipline [of grammar]”: to a precise examination of words and their meaning.76 The grammarian’s sense for the propriety of language, both ﬁgurative and literal, enabled misunderstanding to be avoided.77 Fraud must be exposed, the veil of mistakes stripped away,78 for writing itself was nothing other than a distorted “image and obscure ﬁgure of the will of its author.” Independent of what he desired to signify, his work took on meanings “not merely different from but wholly contrary to his intentions.”79 Employing one of the patristic maxims favored by Abelard,80 Robert of Melun described the process that had led to his colleague being misinterpreted. This hermeneutic of veriﬁcation, inspired by Sic et non but elaborated far beyond it, was then applied, in ten trenchant chapters of the Sententiae,81 67

Ibid., p. 10,29ff. Ibid., p. 11,7ff. 69 Ibid., p. 17,23 – 32. 70 Ibid., p. 19,7– 8. 71 Ibid., p. 20,26, p. 21. 72 Ibid., p. 23,7–16. 73 Ibid., p. 26, 24ff. 74 Ibid., p. 33,1ff. 75 Ibid., p. 33,28ff. 76 Ibid., p. 37,21ff. 77 Ibid., p. 39,10ff. 78 Ibid., p. 42,17ff. 79 Ibid., p. 47,25 –29. 80 See above, p. 81. 81 Martin, ed., Oeuvres, 3,2,17–27, pp. 65 – 87. 68

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to the question of the attributes and existence of the persons in the trinity that Bernard had discussed polemically. Robert argued that those who objected to the view that the Father is omnipotence, the Son wisdom, and the Holy Spirit goodness assumed, without discussion or rational inquiry, that orthodoxy was to be identiﬁed with their obstinacy. Clinging to habit (obstinata consuetudo), they were unacquainted with the teaching of the fathers whom, in their ignorance, they did not hesitate to condemn. Augustine or holy scripture itself might fall prey to their bigotry,82 for these self-appointed agents of God unwittingly became critics of divine majesty. Pretending to speak in the name of the church, they were unable to deﬁne it. Which ecclesia did they mean? That of Jerome and Augustine, whose works they did not know, or that of the hierarchy—an opinion without foundation in synodal and conciliar precedents?83 Heretic hunters unqualiﬁed for their mission, they deserved to be demoted to the level of a sect. More perceptively than any other of Abelard’s defenders, Robert of Melun analyzed the twofold problem posed by Bernard. For the eloquence, brilliant but muddled, of the abbot of Clairvaux, he substituted a hermeneutic, grounded in linguistic propriety yet directed against formalism, virtuosity, and distortion. Patient attention to the works of an author, informed by the understanding that his intention could easily be traduced, should avoid captiousness and arid subtleties. Doubtful cases, in the interpretation of scripture, were to be resolved by establishing congruence between the diction of holy writ and ordinary language. Concrete standards could be established to measure the problems of context and sense, which Bernard’s rhetoric had skirted, while clinging to the dead letter of positions which he chose to attack. No one was safe from this kind of aggressive literalism, declared Robert; a measure of interpretative freedom was indispensable. Even the gospel according to Saint John could not be taken ad litteram.84 Developing Abelard’s theory of the arcaneness of the text into one of its inherent plurality of meaning, Robert of Melun advocated a form of hermeneutic control that had contemporary relevance. Authority could only be maintained by satisfying the scholarly criteria that the abbot of Clairvaux had traduced. Damning what he failed to understand, this selfstyled arbiter of orthodoxy, in his attempt to deﬁne the church according to his own lights, had merely succeeded in casting himself into doctrinal darkness. Unaware of the rules that governed, and made possible, a common discourse, the literalist Bernard had, ﬁguratively, excommunicated himself. Robert of Melun’s line of reasoning led far beyond the engaging if simple perception, current since the eleventh century, that the ﬁgures of the 82

Ibid., 1, 3, 18, pp. 66f. Ibid., 1, 3, 20, pp. 69f. 84 Ibid., 1, 3, 20, pp. 70f. 83

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inquisitor and the heretic were interchangeable. His subtler implication was that, if a mistaken view could be condemned, then a misunderstood one invited the same treatment. Tolerance was therefore in the interest both of the accuser and of the accused. Holy writ, like its modern exegetes, should be safeguarded by learned procedures that mere orators like Bernard did not command. Divesting Abelard’s theology of its air of exclusiveness, Robert of Melun developed the approach adumbrated in Sic et non for resolving points of doubt. Afﬁrming the right of the theologian to examine them with veriﬁable methods, he demonstrated, more effectively than the thinker whom he defended, Abelard’s thesis of the need for a magisterium of scholarship. In what relationship it should stand to the magisterium of the hierarchy Robert did not spell out. Against this background of oblique criticism and direct polemic, Bernard of Clairvaux sought to exploit the gains he had made in 1140–41—intervening (no less than seventeen times) in the election of bishops; counseling kings and prelates; urging, admonishing, and meddling, when he considered them to be weak or wanting. Arnold of Brescia, already reviled in his polemic against Abelard, was the target of Bernard’s attack in 1142. Writing to Bishops Herman of Constance and to the papal legate, Cardinal Guido,85 he depicted himself as continuing the same campaign. Arnold, schismatic and renegade, had been defending the position of his “teacher.” Slight though the evidence is that Abelard taught Arnold, the construction of a didactic link between the two suspects served Bernard’s purpose of discrediting the schools as a hotbed of dissent. The errors condemned in 1141 lived on in the pertinacia of this heretic. Brescia had “spewed him forth,” France had expelled him, Germany had admonished him, Italy had no wish to receive him—but he was rumored to be in the company of the papal legate. “Watch out,” menaced Bernard, “lest on your authority he does further harm.”86 On which authority was this warning issued? On that of the pope: “to contradict the lord pope is tantamount to contradicting the Lord God.”87 These pious sentiments were ﬂatly contradicted by Bernard’s letter to Herman of Constance: “The lord pope, while he was still among us, on account of the evil that he heard about Arnold, commands this to be done in writing: “but he was not the one to do good.”88 Who then was the do-gooder, the true interpreter of scripture’s commands that “the little foxes destroying the vineyard be cap85 Ep. 195 and 196 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1977), pp. 49–51; 51– 52. 86 Ep. 196, p. 51,9 –11. 87 Ibid., p. 52,16. 88 Ep. 195, p. 50,27–28, p. 51,1.

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tured,” that “the big, bad wolf ravaging Christ’s sheepfold be bound down?” None other, of course, than the abbot of Clairvaux. The pope’s spokesman and substitute, Bernard now kept watch on the schools of Paris. There Abelard had built up his following; there he had diffused his unwholesome doctrines. That disease could be cured, however, by the appointment of Robert Pullen to replace Gilbert of Poitiers when he became bishop of Poitiers in 1142. Pullen was a sound theologian, of whom Bernard approved. Unfortunately, the magister was also an archdeacon of Rochester; and his bishop wanted him back.89 A delicate dilemma was thus posed for that advocate of the episcopal ofﬁce, Bernard of Clairvaux.90 Yet there was a solution: “If I admonished Master Robert Pullen to stay in Paris, on account of his sana doctrina, it was because I thought it necessary and still think so.” “If he has powerful friends in the Curia, I mentioned this because I was concerned for you and still am.” “That you have conﬁscated his goods after his appeal to Rome, I neither praised nor praise.” “But I never advised him to contradict your wishes, nor do I advise him to do so now. . . .”91 The pseudo-hypotheses, with their relentless “ifs” and “thens,” make plain the line of thought. Pullen, aided and abbeted by Bernard, had appealed to Rome against his bishop. Ascelin of Rochester was reminded that against “his wishes” were massed compliant cardinals and the grand inquisitor. Playing the power broker in the name of the faith, Bernard stressed Pullen’s connections, while hinting at his own. The inquisitor’s agents were well placed: in the holy city, where he had the ear of the pontiff, and at Paris, where the magister was to stay put. And when, on his elevation to the purple, Pullen became chancellor of the Roman church, his function remained unaltered. Having seen to the sanitas of Parisian theology, he was to keep an eye on the pope. Let the naive Eugenius III,92 bewildered by the din of business and outwitted by evil schemers, not be deprived of speech,93 urged Bernard. Robert Pullen, guardian of the apostolic word, was to mediate it as interpreted by the abbot of Clairvaux. Clairvaux’s spectacular success had produced daughter foundations. One of them was Sant’ Anastasio alle Tre Fontane in Rome.94 When, in Feb89 See F. Courtney, S.J., Cardinal Robert Pullen. An English Theologian of the Twelfth Century, Analecta Gregoriana 64 (Rome,1954), pp. 9 –19. 90 See Y. Congar, “L’Ecclésiologie de saint Bernard,” in Études sur saint Bernard et le texte de ses écrits, ed. J. Leclercq, in Analecta sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9 (1953), pp. 136 – 90, esp. 161ff. 91 Ep. 205 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 64. 92 See further below, pp. 130ff. 93 Ep. 362, p. 310,3 – 6. For context cf. N. Häring, “Saint Bernard and the litterati of His Day,” Citeaux. Commentarii Cistersienses 25 (1974), pp. 199 –222. 94 Cf. R. Locatelli, “L’expansion de l’ordre cistercien,” in Bernard de Clairvaux. Histoire, mentalités, spiritualité: Colloque de Lyons-Cîteaux-Dijon (Paris, 1992), pp. 103 – 42.

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Bernard,95

ruary 1145, its abbot once a monk in the Clairvaux presided over by the other Bernard, was elected pope, the assurance of his former superior was temporarily shaken. With the implausible humility of a puer,96 he addressed “the entire Roman curia.” Astonishment, masked as irony, was voiced in ponderous paradoxes: a man dead to the world had been brought back to life; the cruciﬁed was resurrected; a bumpkin accustomed to rustic labor with trowel and mattock was arrayed in purple silk. Was this an absurdity or a miracle? Miraculous, it was to be hoped, even if there were reasons for doubt. Eugenius III was dainty (delicatus), bashful, retiring. He lacked the authority to perform his onerous duties and, unless he were supported by those rash enough to have chosen him, he would sink under their weight. “Be it on your heads if the pontiﬁcate is a failure” was the sense of Bernard’s broadside to the Roman curia. No less remarkable than the tone, alternating between congratulation and condolence, is one word employed to characterize the unsuitable pontiff. Described as ﬁlius, Eugenius was cast in a role of dependence by a Bernard who saw himself the spiritual parent of the pope. That point was rubbed in by letters written, during the year of his election, to Eugenius himself. Not felicitation but rebuke inspired the ﬁrst.97 When rumor had apprised him of the news, Bernard put pen to paper— and then halted. Silent reﬂection led him to wonder why he had not received a letter. The writer ought to have been the recipient of a message “from one of my sons, who might alleviate my paternal grief ” saying, in the words of Genesis (45:26), “Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt.” Dolor, not joy, explained why Bernard’s epistle was inspired rather by necessity than choice. Friends had urged him, and he could not refuse. Forced by selﬂess charity to give and give again, the abbot of Clairvaux placed himself in the position of Jacob and attributed to the Roman pontiff the role of prodigal son. Eugenius should plead for forgiveness, was the message. Not only had the son failed to communicate with the father; he had also reversed parts. Yet if he who had followed, now preceded, Bernard felt no envy. For the pope who “not only had come after me, but through me”—was “sired by me, as it were, via the Gospel.”98 And if this miserable offspring, covered with dust and grime, was now raised to a princely throne, he should remember, with a deference lacking in his correspondent, his abject origins. 95 See H. Zimmermann in Dizionario biographico degli italiani 43 (Rome, 1993), pp. 490–96 and cf. M. Horn, Studien zur Geschichte Papst Eugens III (1145 –1153) (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 36ff. 96 Ep. 237 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, pp. 113 –15. 97 Ep. 238 in ibid., pp. 115 –19. 98 “. . .ﬁlius in patrem, pater est mutatus in ﬁlium. Qui post me venit, ante me factus est; sed non invideo, quia . . . qui non solum post me, sed etiam per me venit. Nam quodammodo per evangelium ego te genui.” Ibid., p. 116,2– 5.

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Life is short, concluded Bernard—after ﬁnding the time to intervene in a dispute between members of the English episcopate about the papal legateship to that country—and Eugenius ought to recall the brief reigns and early deaths of his predecessors. Criticism masked as felicitation ended with a tart memento mori. So Bernard, in 1145, announced themes that he would pursue with all the determination of his forceful personality. One thing the new pope was never allowed to forget in the series of admonitory epistles with which he was hounded during his eight years on the throne of Saint Peter: placed higher in the hierarchy, Eugenius III remained inferior in the familial vision of his spiritual parent. Not even the appointment of a successor at Tre Fontane was spared the abbot of Clairvaux’s intervention. This time (again in 1145), Bernard portrayed himself as an aggrieved mother, deprived of a beloved son.99 A less beloved son should distinguish between the exaltation of his ofﬁce and the unworthiness of his person, and follow instructions issued in the guise of a request, a lament, or a joke. What mattered was less tenure of the papal ofﬁce than how it was perceived. Did not “people say that I, rather than you, am the pope and ﬂock to me with their business from all sides”? Eugenius III should know his place, as Bernard of Clairvaux knew his. Piqued at the success of a less worthy Cistercian, he sought consolation in self-knowledge, beginning his letter with the accurate words, importunus sum.100 Importunity, acknowledged with mock modesty, and deference, belied by the assurance with which he addressed the pope, were two traits among many that contributed to form Bernard of Clairvaux’s paradoxical personality. When he distinguished between the throne of Saint Peter and its dubious occupant, insisting on the humility of his person while asserting his unofﬁcial auctoritas, both positions were probably sincere, and neither of them was obviously compatible with the other. In this, as in much else, Bernard resembled the contemporary usually construed as his polar opposite: Abelard who, in his attempt to ﬁll a perceived void in the ecclesiastical leadership, represented an anomaly in the structure of the twelfthcentury church. Each of them was forced into contortions of compromise between his traditional role as monk and the claims stated or implied by his goal of magisterium. Rejecting the pretensions of the “masters in the schools,” linking their hermetic methods and sectarian ambitions with heresy, Bernard of Clairvaux remained a member of the caste that he sought to purge. As 99 Epp. 258–60, in ibid., pp. 167–70. See Teubner-Schoebel, Bernhard von Clairvaux als Vermittler, pp. 118 –23 and A. Loup, “Bernard Abbé,” in Bernard de Clairvaux. Histoire, mentalités, spiritualité, pp. 349 –79, esp. 361– 63. 100 Ep. 239 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, p. 120,3 – 5.

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spokesman for the spirituales, he shared with the intellectuals whose failings he castigated an assumption of superiority and an urge to exclusion. Abrupt in his condemnations, bold in his directness, he cultivated an appearance of simplicity which misleads, when judged by its surface effect. The problem is embodied in Bernard’s prose. Pungent, pointed, intended to seize and surprise his readers or hearers with its immediacy and compel their assent to the views it forces on them, it maintains clarity, even when the customarily short sentences expand into periods. Lengthy but limpid, they are animated by the perspicuity of the preacher. Yet artlessness is never a quality of this covert mannerist, even when he writes about themes such as silence.101 Sensitive to the critical attitude of those scholars given to “curiosity,” Bernard condemned display. An aesthetic informed his animus—the aesthetic of austerity that ﬁnds parallels in Cistercian architecture.102 Combining subtle understatement with brutal explicitness, delicate shades of meaning with doctrinaire assertions, his style, like his thought, unites reﬁnement and bluntness. The public ﬁgure who, after Abelard’s debacle, appeared to go from one spectacular success to another—Vézelay in 1146, the council of Étampes and the diet of Frankfurt in 1147, followed by the launching of the second crusade—concealed, beneath his drive and dynamism, an unresolved contradiction. Addressing the magistri with dogmatism, Bernard of Clairvaux was not their enemy. In his attempt to afﬁrm his own version of primacy, he had emerged as their rival. Less an opposition between the school and the cloister than an effort to combine them lay behind his interventions; and all the paradoxes of his position could not be resolved by the self-irony of his letter on silence. While he had intervened at councils and synods or hounded heretics in the Languedoc, others had been voicing discontents that came to a head in 1148. It was one thing to prosecute that misplaced monk, Abelard: quite another to do the same with a scholar who was also a bishop. Two types of ecclesiastical culture unevenly opposed in 1140 clashed eight years later at the consistory that followed the council of Reims. Then Bernard was confronted with a former magister whom satire could not cower nor polemic daunt: Gilbert of Poitiers. The most acute observer at Reims,103 John of Salisbury, was not a monk but a secular cleric with international experience and debts to both parties 101 See C. Mohrmann, “Le style de saint Bernard,” Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, 2: Latin chrétien et médiéval (Rome, 1961), pp. 346 – 67 and cf. above, pp. 14ff. with M. Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought (Leiden, 1994). 102 See G. Duby, Saint Bernard, L’art cistercien (Paris, 1967). 103 On the sources cf. L. Cioni, “Il concilio di Reims nelle fonti contemporanee,” Aevum 1 (1979), pp. 273–300.

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conﬂict.104

in the Having studied at Paris with Gilbert, he had obtained a testimonial from Bernard, which described him to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury as “a friend of mine and of my friends.”105 It is not unlikely that one of them was the abbot of Clairvaux’s protégé among the Parisian masters, Robert Pullen, at whose feet John had also sat.106 Imagine how he reacted to the trial of 1148, which he witnessed at ﬁrst hand. Two of his teachers had been promoted to high ofﬁces of the church. Pullen, as chancellor and cardinal, and Gilbert, as bishop of Poiters, seemed models of success. To Bernard, on the other hand, John owed a reference that had helped to launch his career. If the sympathies of this long-term student lay with the learned prelate whose course through life had appeared, until the accusations of heresy, so smooth and so impressive, he also owed a debt of gratitude to Gilbert’s prosecutor, who had provided assistance at the moment when he was beginning to make his own way in world—hence the ambivalence of John’s account of the trial in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis, written some eleven years after Bernard’s death. When, soon after 1164, John of Salisbury composed that splendid but incomplete work, he represented himself as the continuator of Eusebius and Jerome, of Sigebert of Gembloux and Hugh of Saint Victor.107 Its author did not intend simply to set the Historia Pontiﬁcalis in the tradition of the world chronicle. He also meant to stress his participation in a movement of which Saint Jerome, among Christian authors, was the recognized founder, which traced the living legacy of the past up to the immediate present. This was the movement of the moderni, which brought to the fore the importance of contemporary writers.108 Advance in that direction had already been made in two of John’s works, the Metalogicon and the Policraticus.109 Their values and standards are reﬂected in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis, nowhere more vividly than in its portrayal of Gilbert of Poitiers. Gilbert made his appearance before the curia as “the most lettered man of our age.”110 A master and a bishop, he was to reply to the charges lev104 On John of Salisbury in general, cf. H. Liebschütz, Mediaeval Humanism in the Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950); von Moos, Geschichte als Topik; and World of John of Salisbury. See further below, Chapter V. 105 “amicum meum et amicum amicorum meorum.” Ep. 361 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 8, pp. 307–8. 106 See further below, p. 153. 107 See M. Chibnall, ed., The Historia Pontiﬁcalis of John of Salisbury (Edinburgh, 1956), p. xxviii and ead., “John of Salisbury as Historian,” in World of John of Salisbury, p. 165. 108 See below, p. 317 and cf. P. Godman, “Literaturgeschichtsschreibung im lateinischen Mittelalter und in der italienischen Renaissance,” in Mediävistische Komparatistik. Festschrift für F. Worstbrock, ed. W. Harms (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 176 – 97, esp. 183ff. 109 See below, Chapter V. 110 “Evocatus apparebat in curia vir etate nostra litteratissimus magister Gislebertus episcopus Pictavorum.” Historia Pontiﬁcalis 8, p. 15.

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eled against him by Bernard of Clairvaux, “whose repute was as brilliant as his eloquence.” Each of these terms had a resonance in the sophisticated culture of the curiales about which John writes as an insider. Gilbert, a pupil of Bernard, had been chancellor at Chartres (1126–1138). He belonged to a world which, John claimed elsewhere, his contemporaries had lost. A master of theology before becoming bishop, Gilbert represented the very type to which John had attempted to adapt Thomas Becket, chancellor of King Henry II at the time when the Metalogicon and Policraticus were composed and future archbishop of Canterbury. With less success than John and Gilbert,111 Becket too had studied at Paris—in the schools whose lasting impact on Otto of Freising Rahewin had described with pride,112 to which the Roman nobility sent their sons as preparation for high ofﬁce.113 From such pupils of Peter Abelard as Guido da Città del Castello and Hyacinth Boboni, cardinals and popes (Celestine II and III) were made.114 When asked, by Alexander III, to put forward the names of French clerics suitable for elevation to the purple, Peter, cardinal-priest of San Crisogono and papal legate in France, classiﬁed them according to criteria of their knowledge of litteratura, honestas, and religio—in that order.115 The etate nostra litteratissimus magister Gislebertus episcopus Pictavorum possessed, in their highest form, qualities of learning which, by the mid-twelfth century, were becoming requisite for the higher ranks of the clergy. This was the pattern into which, with allowance made for differences of circumstance and character, John sought to ﬁt both Becket and himself. It was the pattern to which the “revered and eloquent” abbot of Clairvaux did not conform. His case against Gilbert arose, ostensibly, from a sermon delivered on the trinity during an episcopal synod held at Poitiers in 1146. Two of the archdeacons, the ominously named Arnold Qui-non-ridet and Calo,116 protested and appealed to the pope, before whom they appeared at Siena early in 1147. The case was examined by a consistory at Paris in April 1147, shortly after Bernard of Clairvaux had joined Eugenius III’s entourage, 111

See below, p. 173. Gesta Frederici 4,14, ed. F.-J. Schmale, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 17, 2 ed. (Darmstadt, 1974), p. 538. 113 P. Classen, “La Curia romana e le scuole di Francia nel secolo XII,” in Le istituzioni ecclesiastiche della “societas christiana” dei secoli XI-XII: Papato, cardinalato, ed episcopato, Miscellanea del centro di studi medioevali 7 (Milan, 1974), pp. 432– 36 and “Rom und Paris: Kurie und Universität im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert,” in id., Studium und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, pp. 127–69. 114 See Luscombe, The School of Abelard, p. 20 –23. 115 I. S. Robinson, The Papacy 1073 –1198. Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 46–47. 116 See N. Häring, “Zur Geschichte der Schulen von Poitiers im 12. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 47 (1965), pp. 23 – 47, esp. 36. 112

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France.117

then traveling in Inﬂuential names joined the attack: Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis and royal chancellor, Robert of Melun, and Bernard himself. Lack of preparation marked Gilbert’s accusers. It is improbable that either Bernard or Gilbert’s other opponent, Cardinal Alberic of Ostia, had read the suspect works in 1147, for no copy of them was to hand.118 When Gilbert reappeared before the pope, in the aftermath of the council held at Reims the following year, the withdrawal to a consistory held in the archbishop’s palace119 marked Eugenius III’s desire to remove a controversial issue from conciliar proceedings and decide upon it at the highest level of the curia.120 There divisions emerged which the Historia Pontiﬁcalis records. Empathy with Gilbert’s predicament is conveyed by John’s diction. In the ﬁrst version of the prologue to his commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate, the bishop had represented his author as motivated by a desire to combat heresy121 —the charge now leveled against him. That charge, derived not only from his commentary but also from the writings of his pupils, is couched by John in terms that echo Gilbert’s prologue.122 Emphasizing his ﬁdelity to Boethius’s intended meaning, his interpreter viewed his task as “restoring verbal transpositions to order, anomalities of usage to regularity, novelties to the rules.” So consonant with Boethius’s text was Gilbert’s exposition that he might have seemed, to well-trained readers, rather to have plagiarized than invented.123 Accusing him of inconsistency, novelty, and dissidence, the bishop’s opponents, described with studied irony as sapientes, are shown to have asserted the exact opposite of what he had said. At issue was not just the orthodoxy of Gilbert of Poitiers. The basis of authority in accurate representation of the text was also being debated. Just as John of Salisbury distinguishes between true and false citation, so he is at pains to separate oral allegation from established fact. “Many spoke ill of Gilbert, notably Suger, Peter Lombard, and Robert of Melun.” Their 117 Häring, “Das Pariser Konsistorium Eugens III vom April 1147,” Studia Gratiana 11 (1967) [⫽ Collectanea S. Kuttner 1], pp. 95 –117, esp. 96. 118 Ibid., pp. 96 and 109. 119 N. Häring, “Notes on the Council and the Consistory of Rheims (1148),” MS 28 (1966), pp. 39–59, esp. 45ff. 120 See further below, p. 138. 121 The Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers, ed. N. M. Häring (Toronto, 1966), p. 53, 4, 18ff. 122 “Inveniebantur plura digna . . . reprehensione, vel quia non consonabant regulis, vel quia ex novitate verborum absona videbantur.” Historia Pontiﬁcalis 8, p. 15. 123 “. . . interpretum ofﬁcio facientes verborum transpositiones in ordinem, scemata in consequentiam, novitates in regulam . . . reducimus.” “Quae vero a nobis scripta sunt, bene exercitatis lectoribus non modo rationibus ﬁrma verum etiam scripturis autenticis adeo consona esse videntur, ut non tam nostra inventa quam furta esse credantur.” Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers, p. 54 – 5, 8, 46 –7; p. 56, 16, 94 – 6.

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tongues were sharp, their attack determined—but less certain were their motives. Zeal for the faith? Jealousy of Gilbert’s fame? Or a desire to ingratiate themselves with Bernard, arbiter in affairs of church and state? Leaving these questions open, John raises doubts not about Bernard’s inﬂuence but about the nature and effects of his auctoritas. If it was then—1148—at its peak (cuius tunc summa erat auctoritas), opinions, at the time which John wrote his account, were divided (de ipso tamen varia opinio est). Observe the change of tense: Bernard, who once seemed impregnable, had become as susceptible to hearsay and ill will as the bishop whom he attacked. Then a parallel is drawn: “Some linked Gilbert’s case with the cause célèbre of Peter Abelard.” Both of Bernard’s intended victims were “most famous in litteris.” Naturally the holy man’s motive was “zeal for God,” but—equally—Gilbert’s gravity and learning were above suspicion. If others did not understand what he wrote, its meaning was clear to him. From an understated contrast between the truculence of the abbot, standing lower in the ranks of the hierarchy, and the erudition of a scholarly prelate, inaccessible to the multitude, John of Salisbury suggests how Bernard of Clairvaux, his standing now shaken by events, could misapprehend as heretical views that had attracted, during their student days in Paris, the enthusiasm of high-placed members of the curia. Implying that even the saint might seem outmoded or suspect in the changing intellectual world of the curiales during the second half of the twelfth century, John lays stress on the universality of Gilbert’s learning in the seven liberal arts, on the bishop’s familiarity with the works of Hilary and Augustine, doctors of the church and authors of the uncommon terminology to which exception had been taken. What now seemed commonplace, had appeared to some profane and novel when ﬁrst proposed.124 Times might change, was the implication—even for an inquisitor in haste. Again the language of novelty, of difﬁculty, of misunderstanding echoes Gilbert’s prologue to Boethius125 and recalls Robert of Melun’s Sententiae. And again the reasons given for why the bishop had been misunderstood are, in context, double-edged. John presents him not as an innovator but as the reviver of a patristic tradition that had faded from memory. Gilbert, who spent some sixty years in reading and learning, exempliﬁed Quintilian’s maxim that lectio should be co-extensive with life.126 Paragon of the virtues lauded in the Metalogicon, he was the leading érudit of the age. Bernard, by antithesis, was not even capable of recognizing that the terms he condemned were borrowed from Saints Hilary and Augustine. 124

Historia Pontiﬁcalis, p. 16 –17. Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers, p. 53, 4, 20ff; p. 54, 5ff. 126 See below, pp. 159ff. 125

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What he then considered suspect now amounted to no more than the pabulum of the schoolroom. Imagining a posthumous reconciliation between the opponents, John makes plain the reasons for their conﬂict during their lives. Gilbert, who in his ﬁrst prologue had praised Boethius for concealing his meaning under the shroud of obscurity, in order to avoid its being violated by the ignorant and the arrogant, could also be considered the victim of ignorance. Viewed from the heights of advanced scholarship, the saintly Bernard might seem ill educated and profane. Undaunted, the abbot convened a meeting. “At his request,” men distinguished for their learning, piety, or ofﬁce “gathered in his lodging.” What is described, at Historia Pontiﬁcalis 8, amounted to nothing less than an alternative consistory, summoned on Bernard’s personal initiative. That is why, aware of the gravity of the events he was relating, John emphasized his role as an eye-witness and his good faith. Before the gathering of named participants—some alive, some deceased—“the most pious and eloquent” abbot delivered a speech which concluded that it was the duty of those present “to remove all scandals from the church of God.” No matter that he deferred to the assembled prelates and asked for correction to the points on which he believed that he differed from Gilbert. They were read aloud “with the question, “Do you accept this?” in the manner followed for the promulgation of decretals and laws.” And if John records hesitation on one issue, Geoffrey of Auxerre, Bernard’s secretary, paints a different picture. Three representatives of the unlicensed assembly, according to him, presented Eugenius III with their “symbolum ﬁdei” as a countermanifesto to Gilbert’s “confession.”127 While the bishop had declared himself ready to be corrected, they refused: “This is our standpoint. We shall stick to it. Nothing will be altered.”128 Small wonder that, in the eyes of the curia, this appeared a prophana novitas. Bernard of Clairvaux, with his rumpconsistory, was presuming to deﬁne the doctrine of the faith. Indignation and anger were the reactions of the cardinals. Bernard had issued a blatant challenge to the growing status of their order.129 Abelard, they noted, had been the victim of similar machinations. In 1140, at Sens, he had been deprived of access to the protection of the holy see. Now the sacred college would stand behind the bishop and resist the abbot’s attempt to throw the church in England and France behind the call for con127 See N. Häring, “Das sogenannte Glaubensbekenntnis des Reimser Konsistoriums von 1148,” Scholastik 40 (1965), pp. 55 – 90. 128 “ . . . sic vobis nostram offerimus, ut noveritis quod in hoc sumus, in hoc perseverabimus, nihil penitus mutaturi.” N. Häring, ed., “The Writings against Gilbert of Poitiers by Geoffrey of Auxerre,” Analecta Cistercensia 22 (1966), pp. 3 – 83, esp. 76. 129 See J. Sydow, “Il ‘consistorium’ dopo lo scisma del 1130,” Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia 9 (1955), pp. 165 –76 and Robinson, Papacy, pp. 33 –120.

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demnation. One of the subtlest features in John’s description of this drama of ecclesiastical politics being played out at Gilbert’s trial lies in the interchangeability of the rhetoric employed by both parties. Bernard, the bishop’s accuser, threatened “sedition.” Menacing Rome “with fear of schism,” the self-appointed inquisitor, as perceived by a majority of the cardinals, laid himself open to the same accusations he had leveled at Gilbert. Piquant with irony, the scene at Reims revealed the ambivalence of the concept of heresy in the institutional context of a curia exiled from Rome. The conventional picture of black and white so beloved by Bernard no longer convinced; and John portrays the prosecutor’s quandary in delicate shades of grey. Intervening with the pope in order to forestall his opponents, the abbot of Clairvaux is characterized as “a man mighty in deed and word in the sight of God—it is believed—and in the eyes of men, as is a well-known fact.”130 Assessments might be divided, but about Bernard’s powers of persuasion there was no room for doubt. Given the opportunity to speak, he almost always made his will prevail. Understandably the cardinals envied his capacity to intervene and criticized his personal authority. Personal, was John’s emphasis. Not for nothing is Bernard repeatedly characterized as “abbot” and Gilbert as “bishop.” In the clash of hierarchy and inﬂuence, where lay the dividing-line between auctoritas and arrogantia? The bishop’s conduct was different. Interrogated repeatedly and searchingly, he replied, in the terms of the prologue to his commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate, “with arguments and authorities.”131 To the charisma of Bernard and his oratorical power, John opposes the rigor and rationality of Gilbert, “who could not be caught out in speech.” Dexterity as a debater, combined with submission to the Holy See, established the bishop’s reputation for orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, however, implied authenticity; and on this point the scholar insisted. The writings of his pupils, Gilbert declared, should not be ascribed to him. He was willing to submit to correction, but only on the basis of views he had maintained in works by his own hand. The bishop spoke as a man of learning, distinguishing between genuine and spurious writings as an auctor. Auctor, in the literal sense, of his own works—and not those ascribed to him—Gilbert demanded, with the meticulousness of a textual critic, that criteria of correct attribution, integrity, and completeness be recognized. If this “etymological” understanding of authority meant little to the abbot of Clairvaux, to the bishop of Poitiers it was essential, enabling him to state: “It is not ignorance of the truth that makes a heretic, but an overweening 130 “Vir potens in opere et sermone coram Deo—ut creditur—et—ut publice notum est— coram hominibus.” Historia Pontiﬁcalis 9, p. 20. 131 “Auctoritatibus et rationibus responsa muniebat,” Historia Pontiﬁcalis 10, p. 21. Cf. Gilbert, “non modo auctoritate sua verum etiam rationibus,” Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers, p. 53,4,15.

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spirit of contumacy and the presumptuousness of dispute and schism.” A round of applause from the cardinals greeted this declaration by Gilbert of Poitiers. His deﬁnition of a heretic corresponded to the opinion they were forming about the abbot of Clairvaux. Not for the ﬁrst time, roles were reversed. Outrage was no longer the monopoly of the accuser; and when a subdeacon read out heretical opinions ascribed to Gilbert, he himself condemned the pamphlet from which they were derived. The accused became the prosecutor, the inquisitor, and the judge. Censuring those pupils “who have heard me lecture . . . but not understood a word that I said,” Gilbert, as reported by John, recurred to one of the central problems posed by the oral transmission of Abelard’s works.132 The vagaries of didactic tradition, its susceptibility to error, were capable of aligning the misunderstood teachings of a master and the perverse doctrines of a heretic. So it was, in the debate of 1148, that the standards of the work’s authenticity and the purity of its descent were linked.133 The higher scholarship of the schools, where Gilbert had expounded his views, and the highest tribunal of the church were beginning to employ common terms.134 Eugenius III, urged by the cardinals, accepted this defense. How could he do otherwise? The integrity of the written word, upon which Gilbert insisted, formed one of the foundations of papal primacy. The condemned book was cut into fragments and scattered. To the “great crowd of the laity present” the pope explained, in the vernacular, that Gilbert was both orthodox and at one with Rome. As the work was not by the bishop, its proscription did not affect him. And this distinction between genuine and spurious writings was important enough for Eugenius III to communicate it, in the vernacular, to the laymen. Following a precedent set at the council of Reims in 1119,135 he shifted from Latin to French, mediating between the clerical world of the magistri and their unlettered charges. More than Gilbert’s innocence was at stake; and, in the pope’s explanation of the principles that informed his judgment, that of Innocent II, delivered in 1140 against the “public” and illicit discussion of doctrinal matters, was modiﬁed. Driven from the holy city, his successor had to be seen to be universal at Reims. 132

See above, p. 87. On authenticity see Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers, p. 55,9,53 – 54, and cf. B. Guenée, “Authentique et apprové. Recherches sur les principes de la critique historique au moyen Age,” in La Lexicographie du latin médiéval, Colloques du CNRS 589 (Paris, 1978), pp. 215 –29 and von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 213ff., with n. 490. 134 See below, p. 00. 135 See G. Constable, “The Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century,” Viator 25 (1994), p. 140 and n. 50. 133

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If Abelard’s case had been in the cardinal’s minds when they determined to resist Bernard, Eugenius III demolished the parallel. Not the sweeping condemnation of the author and his works effected by Innocent II was the pope’s intention eight years later, but a more discriminating form of correction. He ordered Gilbert’s commentary on the De trinitate to be handed over to him, declaring that he would erase and change anything that required elimination or alteration. This marked a further stage in the development of the hitherto imprecise language of censorship. Polarized between the extremes of total prohibition and unlicensed liberty, it had been ill suited to distinguish a middle way. What the pope now asserted, as guardian of the faith, was the power to change the terms of the debate. Emendation, not damnation, was his purpose. Gilbert, deferring like Abelard to authority, was thus able to identify with orthodoxy, and to transform his judge into an ally. Understanding Eugenius’s irenic intention, the bishop replied in the same spirit. “Far be it from him to cause labor to others. He himself would purge his own works—of course on the pope’s orders.” Papal primacy accepted, the author aimed to become his own corrector. In so delicate an equilibrium of forces, the balance was swung in Gilbert’s favor by the cardinals’ demand that “nothing more should be required of him.” The accused, on the point of absolution, needed support. It was crucial to his cause that this show of humility be interpreted ad litteram. None of the curiales wished to press the paradox of self-censorship as a last bastion of defense. The danger was diminishing. Seeking to reconcile both parties, the pope instructed Gilbert to correct his book in conformity with four propositions formulated by Bernard.136 Since none of them touched on the substance of Gilbert’s commentary, it is hardly surprising that he both agreed that he would excise any statements at variance with the abbot’s propositions and altered nothing in his text. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his impetuousness, did not understand Eugenius III’s judgment on Gilbert’s work, nor did the abbot’s followers. Years later, his biographer, Geoffrey of Auxerre, attempted a damnatio memoriae of the accused. It was, commented John, “elegantly written and justly pleasing to everybody, had it not seemed to possess the character of a polemic and to have been conceived with a certain spleen for some motive or other.” (“Justly pleasing,” therefore, to partisans.) Bernard of Clairvaux continued his vendetta, “but it is not believed that he wrote anything that was not expressed by his zeal for the faith and fervor for charity.” The double negative aroused doubts that it purported to deny. On a less charitable, less ambiguous view than that affected by John of Salisbury, the fanatic had been thwarted. 136

Historia Pontiﬁcalis, 11, p. 24.

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Between Bernard’s perception of himself and the views of others, there existed a gap. Eberhard of Ypres, through the persona of Ratius, measures the distance in his witty dialogue of that name.137 His work gains piquancy from the fact that Eberhard, in later life, became a Cistercian monk. Having studied at Chartres with Gilbert of Poitiers and followed him to Paris, he remained loyal to his master up to and beyond his death. From Gilbert’s teaching in the spirit of the charismatic Bernard of Chartres, Eberhard had learned about the co-operation of the disciplines of the trivium and of their distinct spheres of competence.138 Understanding the methods appropriate to distinct subjects of study provided a guarantee from error and heresy.139 Failure to distinguish between them clearly, or justly to combine them, was a sign of confusion, of ignorance, and incapacity to engage in the dialectical discourse of theology. And the instance cited by Ratius was Bernard of Clairvaux. Competence in a craft was the chief requisite. Bernard had learned no craft; he had little training in the artes and no preparation for theology. He was a moralist who excelled in the art of rhetoric.140 With the “melliﬂuous eloquence” of his exposition of the Song of Songs, he had continued to attack Gilbert of Poitiers after the bishop had been cleared by the pope.141 None of which would have mattered, had not Bernard involved himself in issues beyond his grasp. Claiming privileged access to Christ and to universal knowledge, the saint was a joke.142 In the opinion of the new intellectuals of the second half of the twelfth century, who were attempting to 137 N. Häring, ed., “A Latin Dialogue on the Doctrine of Gilbert of Poitiers,” MS 15 (1953), pp. 243 – 89. See id., “The Cistercian Everard of Ypres and His Appraisal of the Conﬂict between St. Bernard and Gilbert of Poitiers,” MS 17 (1955), pp. 142–72, and P. von Moos, “Literatur- und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte der Dialogform im lateinischen Mittelalter. Der Dialogus Ratii des Eberhard von Ypern zwischen theologischer disputatio als Scholaren-Komödie,” in Tradition und Wertung, Festschrift für F. Brunhölzl, ed. G. Bernt, R. Rädle, and G. Silagi (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 165 –210. 138 Häring, ed., “Dialogue,” pp. 258ff. On Bernard of Chartres, see below, pp. 159ff. 139 Ibid., p. 271 with von Moos, “Aspekte,” pp. 194 – 95. For the theory of rationes propriae in Gilbert of Poitiers, see J. Marenbon, “Gilbert of Poitiers,” in Cambridge History, pp. 334ff. and below, pp. 134ff. 140 “Nota unicuique artiﬁci in sua facultate credendum—ut logico in logica, geometrae in geometria, et fabro in fabrateria, et theologo in theologia. Sed iste sanctus, de quo est sermo, nullius artis artifex inventus, in artibus exercitatus parum, in quaestionibus theologiae nihil, in moralibus uero theologicis multum . . . quod de fonte spiritus sancti plene hausit in sermonibus super Cantica Canticorum conscriptis per melliﬂuum et subtile et exornatum ipsius eloquium apparuit.” Häring, ed., “Dialogue,” p. 271. 141 Historia Pontiﬁcalis 11, p. 25. 142 “Vis probare mihi quod, quia veritas hoc dicebat, quidquid Christus noverit, noverit et beatus Bernardus. Nam si quidquid Christus a Patre audivit, Bernardo notum fecit. Sed quidquid ipse Christus scivit, a Patre audivit. Ergo quidquid Christus scivit, Bernardo notum fecit. Sed nihil Christus Bernardo notum fecit, quod Bernardus non noverit. Ergo Christus nihil scivit, quod sanctus Bernardus non scivit. Ergo sicut Christus omnia sciens est, et bea-

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evolve, on an interdisciplinary basis, a precise theological language that both respected the boundaries and encouraged contact between related subjects, Bernard was out of his depth. He lacked the culture, the preparation, the clarity to engage in a debate about heresy. That judgment is borne out by the creed recorded by John of Salisbury. Ignored by Gilbert, when (or if) he revised his commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate, the four articles or propositions ascribed to Bernard in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis are anything but the product of sophisticated theological thought. “Never given an ofﬁcial status,”143 their lack of effect on Gilbert’s career and inﬂuence may partly explain the persistence of Bernard’s animosity—partly, because the conﬂict had deeper origins. Gilbert’s sincerity was questioned. He was suspected of deviousness in his erudite obscurity. He always escaped from the attempts of his enemies to ensnare him, for he was a master of patristic thought. But if Gilbert’s humility seemed questionable, that could not be wholly attributed to the malice of his foes. When Bernard offered to meet him for an amicable discussion about the works of Saint Hilary, the scholar declined, advising the abbot to take an elementary course in the liberal arts.144 This advice was pointed. The contrast between the learned prelate and the eloquent preacher, steeped in the Bible but with little grasp of advanced scholarship, is graphically drawn in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis. While Bernard excelled in command of scripture, Gilbert surpassed him in his knowledge of the church fathers. A scholar’s scholar, impenetrable to beginners, Gilbert expounded the qualities of poetry and oratory even when he taught theological matters. He brought a new sense of methodological propriety to an approach pioneered by Bernard of Chartres.145 At the cathedral school of that town, as in the lecture-rooms of Paris, the bishop of Poitiers had shown the unity of distinct but related branches of learning. The cultural ideal of concordantia artium was thus expressed in John’s antithesis between the erudite thinker and his less learned critic. Gilbert’s approach was interdisciplinary: Bernard—persuasive and sincere, but hasty and superﬁcial—emerged, in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis, as a holy version of that profane enemy of learning called, in the Metalogicon, Corniﬁcius.146 The structure of John’s history is thus built on dramatic contrasts and ironies of reversal. His work presents Gilbert as a foe of heresy, the sin of which he was accused by Bernard. Heresiarchs, on the bishop’s deﬁnition,

tus Bernardus. Hoc forte monachis suis persuadebis: at non mihi.” Häring, ed., “Dialogue,” pp. 271–72. 143 Häring, “Council and Consistory of Rheims,” p. 59. 144 Historia Pontiﬁcalis 12, p. 26. 145 See below, p. 159. 146 See below, p. 153.

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were those “who sought to twist and appropriate scripture,” who misused “arguments and authorities.” Criticizing his opponents for their incapacity to distinguish between pardonable and damnable errors, Gilbert recurred to one of Abelard’s positions. Scandal, deﬁning attribute of heresy, was not caused by changes in words. Linguistic mutability was admissible; truth remained constant.147 Hence the pertinence of Abelard’s aside to Gilbert at Soissons: tua res agitur. The defeated cause of 1121 was becoming, in 1148, the causa victrix; and the process is reﬂected in the attention John pays not only to Gilbert’s impugned doctrines but also to the principles on which they were founded. Proof depended on analysis of the sources. Reconstruction of their original meaning was essential in the attempt to formulate, with “alien,” “improper,” and “inadequate” terms, complex theological ideas.148 All of this was familiar on the Parisian intellectual scene. Behind the interpretative criteria formulated in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis lies the hermeneutic of veriﬁcation taught orally, before being recorded in the prologue to his Sententiae, by Robert of Melun to students who included John of Salisbury. Gilbert had more in common with that colleague who opposed him in 1148 than their enmity might seem to suggest. Both of them developed their ideas in the wake of Abelard’s second trial and condemnation. Hilary of Poitiers loomed large in the thought of the bishop of that city because he cast himself as his continuator. To Gilbert, tradition was the high route along which the responsible interpreter traveled with a sense of peril shared by Robert of Melun. Even the doctors of the church were capable of statements that might subsequently appear contrary to the faith. Only an understanding of context could enable misinterpretation to be avoided, and the ability to discern the writer’s intention and the circumstances of his reception was essential, emphasized John, pupil of both masters.149 The true guardian of orthodoxy, like the faithful exegete praised in the prologue to the Sententiae, was, and should be, the scholar. Erudition and religion stood together, complementary and indispensable, as Abelard had argued. The one without the other was dangerous. Witness, the Historia Pontiﬁcalis implies, Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard, in his zeal for polarities, polarized the debate about heresy, and the intellectuals’ reaction exposed the irresponsibility with which this polyvalent concept was being used. The case of Gilbert, John’s ﬁrst example, 147 “Adiciebat si coram simplicioribus, ne scandalizarentur verba posse mutare, sed de ﬁde quam ei contulerat Spiritus Sanctus nihil immutaturum. Nam sola mutatione verborum non relinquitur veritas, pro qua certum est scandala ﬁdeliter sustineri.” Historia Pontiﬁcalis 13, p. 29. 148 Ibid., 13, p. 36. 149 See above, p. 118.

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in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis, is reinforced by a second: Arnold of Brescia, Bernard’s other bête noire, whom he depicted as Abelard’s partner in crime. The Roman church, reports John, had excommunicated Arnold and ordered him to be shunned “as if he were a heretic” (tamquam hereticum).150 The transgressions of this rebel against papal authority are not denied but balanced by the attention paid to Arnold’s positive qualities. A priest and a regular canon, he was an intelligent student of scripture, an eloquent orator, and a ﬁery preacher against the vanities of the world. Thus far the perceived heretic did not differ signiﬁcantly from the future saint Bernard. Nor did the resemblance between them derive only from their virtues. Arnold, “they say,” was a fomenter of sedition and schism. Nothing different had been said, by the indignant cardinals in 1148, about the rump-consistory led by the abbot of Clairvaux. “They say” marks distance from the opinions that John relates. Dedicating the Historia Pontiﬁcalis to Peter, abbot of Celle, he was scrupulous in recording his sources. Firsthand observation, not the documents he had been unable to ﬁnd among the records of the council or in the papal registers, certiﬁed John’s report of the propositions about the faith issued by Bernard at Reims.151 Nothing is certiﬁed in his account of the judgments passed on Arnold of Brescia. Deposed by Pope Innocent and expelled from Italy, he became a pupil of Peter Abelard. So did “Master Hyacinth, who is now a cardinal.” The juxtaposition implied a common cause. Both the alleged heretic, shunned by the faithful, and the prince of the church supported Abelard’s case against the abbot of Clairvaux. Arnold instructed the poor and needy. His teaching was in accord with Christian theory but inconsistent with Christian practice. He denounced the episcopate for its avarice and corruption, while upbraiding Bernard for his envy of others’ distinction in literature or religion, “if they did not belong to his school.” Arnold, outside the clerical establishment, expressed opinions shared by those highly placed within it. He called, with perfect piety, for reform in the same style and spirit that John of Salisbury himself adopted when admonishing Pope Adrian IV.152 Neither siding with the heretic nor condemning him like his enemies, the Historia Pontiﬁcalis occupies a middle ground between ofﬁcial opprobrium and fellow-feeling. Arnold founded his own “sect,” called the Lombard heresy. His followers, popular for their austerity of life, attended to his speeches on the vices of the curia and the pope. An orator in the manner of Christ, Arnold inﬂamed the mob with appeals to liberty and Roman patriotism. Demon150 Ibid., 31, pp. 62ff. See A. Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nelli fonti del secolo xii (Turin, 1989), pp. 95ff. 151 Historia Pontiﬁcalis 11, p. 25. 152 See Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia, pp. 108 – 9.

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strating why the “heretic” was a danger to the temporal order of the church, John never states or implies that Arnold was wrong. If the innocents who, with him, deﬁed the ecclesiastical hierarchy were continentiae sectatores, Bernard, according to the defrocked abbot, was a vane glorie sectator with a “school” of adherents. The parallel was plain. Accusation matching accusation, which of the parties was right? John, leaving the matter open, shows the nexus of ambivalence that bound the inquistor and the heretic to one another. Only by forcing them apart, and excluding Bernard from the picture, was it possible to simplify and sustain the categorical view taken by Otto of Freising.153 Arnold of Brescia is less described by Otto than condemned. And this is done in a style that differs from the customary concreteness with which the Gesta Frederici are written. Detailed political charges mingle with vague clichés. The grounds for regarding Arnold as a desecrator of the religious habit he wore are said to have been apparent from his teaching,154 but little or no information is provided about that suspect doctrina in matters of religion. The heretic stirred up rebellion against the pope and the church in the holy city. He appealed to the emperor. Factious and seditious, he was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” who seduced the ignorant people with his wicked dogmas. A pupil of Abelard and “far from stupid, Arnold was a ﬂuent but superﬁcial speaker, a lover of the exceptional, a fan of novelty—as heretics and schismatics are.”155 A pedigree was thus constructed. Adherence to Abelard implied to be a natural consequence of Arnold’s rebellion against the church, what he learned at Paris is never disclosed. Nor is guilt by association a sufﬁcient explanation: Abelard, as Otto was aware, had found defenders at the highest reaches of the Roman curia, and Arnold had therefore to be assimilated to a type. Deceptive rhetoric, excessive individuality, innovation: the thin platitudes of accusation are lent ﬂimsier substance by a reference to opinions, “said to be unsound,” on the sacrament of the mass and infant baptism. Which of the twelfth-century sects was not proscribed for a variant of these errors? If Arnold of Brescia was indeed a heretic, Otto of Freising consigns him to a limbo without name.156 153 Gesta Frederici 1, 29, p. 182; 2, 30, pp. 338ff. with Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia, pp. 37–69. 154 “Arnaldus quidam religionis habitum habens, sed eum minime, ut ex doctrina eius patuit, servans.” Gesta Frederici 1, 29, p. 182. 155 “Vir quidem nature non hebetis plus tamen verborum proﬂuvio quam sententiarum pondere copiosus, singularitatis amator, novitatis cupidus, cuiusmodi hominum ingenia ad fabricandas hereses scismatumque perturbationes sunt prona.” Ibid., 2, 30, p. 338. 156 Cf. Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia, p. 55.

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Content with clichés at the level of doctrine, the Gesta Frederici display contradictions on the political plane. They reveal the true source of Otto’s anxiety, the standpoint from which he regarded Arnold as a threat. “Tearing everything up, devouring everything, sparing no one, this reviler of the clergy and the episcopate, this persecutor of monks, ingratiated himself only with laymen.” Laicis tantum adulans: were they, therefore, no one? Not quite, on Otto’s own admission, for the ashes of Arnold’s body were tossed, after its incineration, into the Tiber to prevent them being venerated by “the stupid plebs.” The potential inspirer of cult had betrayed his order. He had denied that clerics who had property, bishops who had regalia, and monks with possessions could achieve salvation. Reviving, on the example of ancient Rome and against papal authority, the senatorial and equestrian orders, he had provided a lay government for the holy city. This was the “poisonous doctrine” promulgated by Arnold of Brescia; and the effects of its contagion were felt when the populace sacked the splendid residences of the Roman nobility and cardinals, one of whom was beaten up. Otherwise ill deﬁned, the heretic assumed clear features when he represented a menace to the stability of the church. From this it followed that Arnold’s theological teaching must have been pernicious, even if Otto was incapable of stating what it entailed. As he recorded how the palaces of the Roman aristocracy and the sacred college had been destroyed by the unleashed mob, the emperor’s uncle and bishop of Freising quivered with rage. Otto’s horizons, marked by the class and the hierarchy of which he was a member, inclined him to view the trials of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers as contrasts.157 Abelard, the scoffer and sceptic, took the same liberties with order as Arnold: publice, without training in theology, he had dealt with matters of religion. Presumptuously, he had despised his teachers and proclaimed himself an autodidact. Contempt for didactic tradition was arrogance in Otto’s eyes, and venturing beyond the limits of ecclesiastical control amounted to heresy. Gilbert of Poitiers did not ﬁt into that category of error. All that made his case comparable to that of Abelard’s was the enmity of Bernard. Zeal, credulity, and a hostility to those with a rational approach to the mysteries of the faith had inspired the abbot’s attack on Gilbert.158 Yet throughout his account of the bishop’s trials, Otto too is at pains to demonstrate their charges rebounding on the accused’s opponents. Joscelin, bishop of Soissons, after taxing his “obscure diction with being a profane novelty” made the same mistake.159 The theological de157 Gesta Frederici 1, 50ff., pp. 224ff. Cf. S. Gammersbach, Gilbert von Poiters und seine Prozesse im Urteil der Zeitgenossen (Cologne, 1959), pp. 131ff. 158 Gesta Frederici, 1, 50, p. 224. 159 Ibid., 1, 55, p. 240.

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bate related without comment passed,160 Otto mentions the case of Eon de l’Etoile, regarded by the curia as insane161 and derisively dismissed, in the Gesta Frederici, as “an illiterate peasant unworthy of the name of heretic.”162 Contrast with Eon, like comparison with Abelard, served to underscore the same point. Heresy, for the prelate trained at Paris, was a sin of the learned. Too learned was Gilbert’s defense, as Otto describes it, even for the pope. Wearied by the protracted reading aloud of patristic authorities, Eugenius III asked the bishop whether he identiﬁed the highest essence with God. The denial caused scandal. If the written word tired, the spoken one deceived; and as the debate wore on, with Bernard’s démarche outraging the the cardinals, the pope is represented by Otto as a peacemaker.163 Placed between a sacred college determined to assert its power, a Bernard “deceived by human fragility,” and the “most learned” Gilbert, Eugenius III had to resolve the dispute.164 Truth was too much to hope for, and Otto’s uncertainty about the verdict remained until the end of his life.165 Yet about one fact he had few doubts. The pope—bored by Gilbert, browbeaten by Bernard, and intimidated by the curia—decreed that no theological distinction was to be made between the nature and person of God, who could be described as divina essentia not only in the ablative but also in the nominative sense. Eugenius III had delivered his judgment in the language of a grammaticus. Language, in particular a philosophical use of grammatical theory, was one of the foundations of Gilbert’s theology.166 The deliberate obscurity that he attributed to Boethius’s Opuscula sacra167 was interpreted, by his own enemies, as a verbal covering for blasphemy.168 Novelty alone, according to Gilbert’s enemies such as Geoffrey of Auxerre, was sufﬁcient reason to 160

Ibid., 1, 56, pp. 240 – 48. See R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (London, 1977), pp. 69ff. 162 Gesta Frederici, 1, 58, p. 250. 163 Ibid., 1, 61, p. 258. 164 Ibid., 1, 62, p. 260. 165 Ibid., 4, 14, p. 542. 166 See the bibliographical note by J. Marenbon, “Gilbert of Poitiers,” in Cambridge History, p. 329 n. 7. 167 On Gilbert and Boethius’s obscuritas, see above and cf. Marenbon, “Gilbert of Poitiers,” p. 332. 168 Cf. Geoffrey of Auxerre, Sancti Bernardi vita prima 3,5,15, ed. N. M. Häring, “The Writings against Gilbert of Poitiers by Geoffrey of Auxerre,” Analecta Cisterciensia 22 (1966), p. 30: “Nouissime tamen cum iam ﬁdelium super hoc inualesceret scandalum, cresceret murmur, uocatus ad medium est et librum tradere iussus, in quo blasphemias emouerat graues quidem sed uerborum quodam inuolucro circumseptas.” 161

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heretical.169

condemn a doctrine as The bishop of Poiters held a different and subtler opinion. “Twisting” the sacred text was not only a malpractice of heresiarchs, but also of his enemies, who were not learned enough to distinguish between false doctrines, a number of which they had absorbed and taught.170 What they branded as a novitas derived, had they known it, from the fathers of the church. These arguments, substantially the same as those used by Robert of Melun in his defense of Abelard, were lost on those incapable of grasping the combination of ﬂexibility and strictness in the scholar’s hermeneutics. They were not lost on Eugenius III. The pope, in John of Salisbury’s opinion, was given to suspicion. Disinclined to believe anyone unless convinced by personal experience or plain authority, Eugenius’s attitude, according to John, was attributable to weakness of character and awareness of his advisers’ failings.171 But was this all? Consider the pope’s position at the consistory of Reims. Before him stood a distinguished member of the French episcopate, explaining at length his impenetrable doctrines. Behind the prosecuted the sacred college had closed ranks. And the accuser, supported by eminent clergymen of two nations upon whose loyalty the exiled bishop of Rome depended, was his former superior and self-appointed admonisher. It would not do to invoke the primacy of Peter. Eugenius III was a pope on the run from the holy city. That he was also a judge of discernment, is proved by how he conducted the trial of Gilbert of Poitiers. Placating Bernard and his allies, while leaving the bishop a way out, Eugenius showed that he was a match for the men of learning in his entourage whose counsels he had every reason to mistrust. The pope insisted on criteria of authenticity, comprehensibility, and truth in terms that John of Salisbury and Otto of Freising were able to translate into their own. Yet Eugenius III, product of an exclusively monastic culture, did not share their experience of the schools. Where then did he acquire the basis of a common discourse with the intellectuals? Probably not at Pisa, and certainly not at Clairvaux. At Clairvaux’s Roman foundation, Tre Fontane, there resided, during the fourth decade of the twelfth century, a textual critic named Nicola Ma169 “Id nempe solum ad omnem confutacionem nouitatis presertim in ratione ﬁdei satis esse debuerat quod nouitas est. Nam quod testimonia interdum aliqua scripturarum exquisita detorquent nouitatis auctores quante presumptionis est tanquam soli ipsi legerint intellexerintue scripturas.” Libellus contra capitula Gisleberti episcopi Pictavensis 5, 27, ibid., p. 66. 170 Historia Pontiﬁcalis, p. 28. 171 “Erat namque suspiciossimus, ut vix alicui crederet, nisi in hiis, que rerum experientia vel auctoritas perspicua suadebat. Suspitionem vero ex duabus causis provenisse arbitror: tum ex inﬁrmitate nature tum quia conscius erat egritudinis laterum suorum (sic enim assessores et consiliarios consueverat appellare).” Ibid., 21, p. 51.

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niacutia.172

Accompanying his “abbot B.” on a visitation of a monastery near the Roman basilica of San Martino ai Monti, at a date between 1140 and 1145,173 Nicola observed, in the scriptorium, an innocent of nature “correcting” an old exemplar of the Bible against a new one. “How do you know, brother, that the new book is more veracious than the old?” he asked. The scribe replied, “Because it contains more.” “Just as you think that the old exemplar has less than is to be found in the new, so you might consider that what is not in the old exemplar is superﬂuous in the new.” Careful scrutiny revealed a number of accretions. Arbitrary conjectures, Nicola explained, had both lengthened and abbreviated the text. Had the additions and omissions been authentic, they would have been found in all exemplars. Only in the more recent copies he had investigated were these interpolations to be found, not in older witnesses that had been corrupted by novorum aemulatio. Interpolators had been at work, the manuscripts were depraved.174 The monks lamented at the wasted time and expense. A pretty lesson in textual criticism for all present—including the “abbot B.” whom Nicola accompanied. “Abbot B.” was Bernard of Pisa. Abbot Bernard of Pisa became, in 1145, Pope Eugenius III. The ear and mind of this intelligent Cistercian were not deafened by the thunders of the other Bernard. In a less minatory tone, at the Roman monastery and its dependences over which the former “Abbot B.” had 172 See V. Peri, “‘Correctores immo corruptores’. Un saggio di critica testuale nella Roma del xii secolo,” IMU 20 (1977), pp. 19 –125; “Nicola Maniacutia: un testimone della ﬁlologia romana del xii secolo,” Aevum 41 (1967), pp. 67–90 and “Notizia su Nicola Maniacutia, autore ecclesiastico romano del xii secolo,” Aevum 36 (1962), pp. 531– 38. 173 Peri, “‘Correctores immo corruptores’,” p. 27 and n.3. 174 “Lustrans nuper cum abbate meo B. ofﬁcinas monasterii Sancti Martini in Monte, cuius ei visitatio iniuncta erat, cum scriptorium fuissemus ingressi, veterem ibi bibliothecam invenimus, quam ad novum exemplar frater quidam corrigere videbatur. Aggressus igitur eam discutere, quam redarguebant mendacii, vix corruptionem reperiebam, nisi in locis illis, quae corrigi putabantur. Aio autem scriptori: ‘Unde scis, frater, novum hunc librum veraciorem veteri?’ ‘Ab eo’, ait, ‘quod ibi plura continentur’. Cui inquam: ‘Sicut putas veterem habere minus ea, quae sunt in novo, sic putare potes in novo esse superﬂua, quae non sunt in veteri’. Et investigans adhuc loca, quae dicebantur correpta, tot appositiones repperi quot me nunquam recolo repperisse. Intendentes qui aderant transcurrere coeperunt et ipsi, sed ammirantes testabantur se horum plurima amplius non audisse. Loci vero fratres dolere, eo quod cum propria et opera et impensa suum exterminassent volumen. Quaerebant autem a me, a quibus mala ista procederent. ‘A praesumtoribus’, inquam: ‘ipsi faciunt nobis malum hoc grande, qui fonte veritatis postposito ad sui coniecturam arbitrii vel minuunt vel apponunt. Nam si interpretes hoc fecissent, in cunctis exemplaribus haberentur’. Ego autem, multa investigans volumina, in novis tantum haec superﬂua deprehendi, seu etiam in his veteribus, quae novorum aemulatio corrupisset. Dixi quoque in corde meo de adiunctionibus istis, ut omnes de tota bibliotheca exciperem et dictiones inter quas continentur notarem; ut, verbi gratia, in primo Regum: Locutus est cum Saule in solario cumque mane surrexissent. Si quid interponitur est superﬂuum. Habent enim codices depravati: ‘stravit autem Saul in solario et dormivit’. Sed hoc alias.” Ibid., p. 121, 26 – 35 and p. 122, 1–14.

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presided, critical opinions had been voiced about the transmission and state of the sacred text by one of his gifted fratres. Nicola Maniacutia occupied himself with the Bible and the psalter. He observed the example, followed the model, and adopted the persona of Saint Jerome. Scathing in his castigation of error and corruption, this rigorous philologist employed a vocabulary that closely resembled the one used, in his accusations, by Bernard of Clairvaux. Falsehood and lies (mendacia); corruption, viciousness, and depravation (corruptio, vitiositas, depravatio) are the terms Nicola used to describe the peccant text.175 An arrogant yearning for novitas accounted for its deplorable condition. Twisting the sense of scripture, its interpreters compounded the mistakes of translators.176 A direct link, a causal connection, existed between error and presumption.177 Ambiguity was to be eliminated178 and falsehood unmasked as a “veiled form of the truth” (falsitas veritas specie palliata). Facile readings should not be preferred; the new and unprecedented found favor because they lent an appearance of learning.179 On the contrary, argued Nicola (echoing Jerome), the biblical canon was replete, to the last iota, with sacraments and ought not be altered by those wishing to foist their own opinions on what they failed to understand.180 All of this was familiar to Eugenius III when, a handful of years later, he heard it from the lips of Bernard of Clairvaux as he denounced Gilbert of Poitiers. The language of heresy and the language of textual criticism were related in the Cistercian circles where the pope had moved. Signiﬁcantly different, however, were the methods employed by Maniacutia and by Bernard. If the Roman monk decried corruption, as a philologist he despised consuetudo. By consuetudo Nicola did not mean “tradition,” in the conservative sense understood by the abbot of Clairvaux, but “habit,” leading to sloth and sloppiness.181 Nicola, who saw himself as a prosecutor and as a judge,182 was capable of arraigning the church fathers before the tribunal of error. Even Jerome, his model, did not escape the sting of his lash.183 175

Cf. Peri, “Nicola Maniacutia: un testimone,” p. 80. Id., “‘Correctores immo corruptores’,” p. 92,1– 4. 177 Ibid., p. 95, 5ff. 178 Ibid., p. 102,16ff.; p. 103,1– 5. 179 Ibid., p. 110,1– 5. 180 Ibid., p. 109,37ff. 181 Ibid., p. 88,10–11 and cf. Peri, “Nicola Maniacutia: un testimone,” p. 84 and R. Weber, “Deux préfaces au psautier: Nicolas Maniacoria,” Revue Bénédictine 63 (1953), p. 7. 182 Peri, “‘Correctores immo corruptores’,” p. 72. 183 “Credendum vero est beatum Ieronimum in superiori sententia veteres fuisse secutum vel nondum plene assecutum notitiam Hebraeae linguae. Nam et in psalmo octogesimo sexto, ubi in Gallicana et Romana translatione legimus: memor ero Rahabh et Babilonis, nomen meretricis, id est ‘rachab’, interpretatum exposuit, cum postmodum de Hebraico idem transferens non Rachab, nomen mulieris, sed ‘rahab’, quod est superbia, interpretatus sit: recordabor, inquiens, superbiae et Babilonis.” Ibid., p. 90,6 –13. 176

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The Hebraica veritas to which the saint appealed could be misunderstood both by him and by Hugh of Saint-Victor.184 Authority was not sufﬁcient; reason provided a guide.185 Any reading invited a promiscuous variety of interpretations, for “the letter is like a whore, offering unlimited entry.”186 Truth had to be the governing criterion, ascertained by the author’s intention—the auctoris veritas 187 —and by transmission, both Latin and Hebrew (except where they diverged, and the malice of the Jews might be suspected).188 Authenticity established by rational methods, zealousness was to be avoided. Caution should be observed “as is customary among the fathers of our order alone.”189 Among the several Cistercian patres to whom Nicola Maniacutia might have referred, one was not Bernard of Clairvaux. “Abbot B.,” before 1145, had been acquainted with the exponent of a sophisticated philological method. To the Bible and the psalter Nicola brought to bear the techniques of a textual critic, clarifying the terms employed in the confused debate about heresy with methods shared by the scholars at Paris. Notable was his sense of historical caution. The authority of the transmitted Latin text was diminished by its third place in a chain of tradition that reached from the Hebrews to the Greeks. The multitude of exegetes and translators of scripture, who imposed their own interpretations on the sacred authors, ought to arouse suspicion.190 If nothing happened without cause in the church, hermeneutic standards were necessary in order to discern how and why change occurred.191 The truth to be sought was not that of the interpreter but of the author, in its pristine form 184

Ibid., p. 89,31– 33. Ibid., p. 109,33ff. 186 Ibid, p. 111,3 –10. 187 Ibid., p. 111, 7– 8. 188 Ibid., p. 106,29ff. 189 “Apud solos nostri ordinis patres, qui solent esse aliis cautiores.” Ibid., p. 105,22–23. 190 “Quid horum verum sit—nam utrunque verum esse non potest, cum propheta diversus a se ipso non fuerit—quibuscunque argumentis valeo et maxime veritatis Hebraicae testimonio, ut praedictum est, indagabo. Ab eo enim fonte hauserunt Graeci, quae sunt postea propinata Latinis; quare mendosiores sunt translationes nostrae de Graeco sumptae translationibus de Hebraico editis, quia scilicet tertio deducta gradu, dum ab Hebraeis ad Graecos, a Graecis ad nos devenerunt. Quo magis per diversa ora devolutae sunt, eo a veritate amplius elongarunt. Praeterea multos habuisse leguntur expositores, qui translationes varias commiscentes et ad diversos sensus dicta extorquentes prophetica, addunt ad mendacia translatorum multa imponentes prophetis, quae nunquam venerunt in cor eorum.” Ibid., p. 96,33–39; p. 97,1–4. 191 “Sed quia haec alio tractatu indigent, breviter dicendum est quod in omnibus ecclesiasticis institutis consideratae sunt rationes et causae, nichilque in Ecclesia sine causa ﬁeri. Et si qua sunt, quae ego indagare non possim, imperitiae meae hoc et non magistris Ecclesiae imputabo, qui videlicet Spiritu Sancto repleti usque ad unum iota omnia sollicite perscrutantes nichil sine causa in Ecclesia statuerunt; quapropter iniquum cernitur de his aliquid immutare, tanquam illi non recte fecerint, vel nos discretionis spiritu amplius vigeamus.” Ibid., p. 96,8–15. 185

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sense.192

and original The critic had a duty to defend the misapprehended veritas.193 This procedure, intended by its exponent to be applicable to oral dispute and debate,194 exercized a visible inﬂuence on Eugenius III at the consistory of Reims. Declining to act as a censor in the condemnatory style of Innocent II, the pope attempted to establish the auctoris veritas on the model of Nicola Maniacutia. Only when he had ascertained that some of the writings attributed to Gilbert of Poitiers were spurious, did Eugenius III proscribe. Insisting on correct attribution, he sought the original and authentic text, not its willful or arbitrary accretions. Contrary to the spirit of clerical exclusiveness that had been so decisive in the debacle of Abelard, Eugenius III took care to explain to the laymen in their own language what was at issue. And while he sought to ﬁnd a compromise between Gilbert’s right to maintain his views and the convictions of his opponents, the pope acknowledged the authority of the writer to add, subtract, and emend, in order to clarify his meaning. John of Salisbury, ascribing Eugenius III’s reliance on rerum experientia and auctoritas perspicua to the weakness of his character, failed to do him justice. Suspicion of ill-informed interpretations, combined with respect for the intention of the author and the integrity of his work, led the pope to adhere to principles Gilbert of Poitiers had reason to appreciate. For the approach formed by Maniacutia’s textual criticism has analogies in Gilbert’s own commentary on the Pauline epistles.195 His acquittal was made possible through the application of criteria developed by a member of the order to which belonged both his judge, Eugenius III, and his accuser, Bernard of Clairvaux. Scholarship, prime source of intellectual heresy, provided the techniques with which it was redeﬁned. Bernard, with that talent for adapting himself 192

Cf. ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 79. 194 Ibid., p. 46. 195 Cf. his comments on Paul’s letter to the Romans: “quidam Latini codices, quos constat a veteribus Grecis translatos, qui ita habent: in eos, qui peccaverunt etc., quos inconceptos simplicitas temporum servavit, et probat. Postquam vero a concordantia animis dissidentibus et haereticis perturbantibus moveri quaestionem coeperunt, multa tam in Grecis quam in Latinis codicibus ab hereticis contentionis studio mutata sunt, qui cum propria auctoritate uti non possunt ad victoriam, verba legis adulterant, ut sensum suum quasi verbis legis asserant, et contradicentibus sibi quasi auctoritate resistant.” A. Landgraf, ed., “Zur Methode der biblischen Textkritik im 12. Jahrhundert,” Biblica 10 (1929), pp. 457– 85. 196 “Sermo ei, quoties opportuna inveniebatur occasio, ad quascumque personas de aediﬁcatione animarum, prout tamen singulorum intelligentiam, mores et studia noverat, quibusque congruens auditoribus erat. Sic rusticanis plebibus loquebatur, ac si semper in rure nutritus; . . . litteratus apud eruditos, apud simplices simplex, apud spirituales viros perfectionis et sapientiae afﬂuens documentis. Omnibus se coaptabat, omnes cupiens lucrifacere Christo.” PL 185, 306C–D. 193

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to his public applauded by William of St-Thierry,196 began to grasp that link. Less from a failure to understand Abelard’s theological arguments, than a refusal to accept the foundation on which they were built, he sought to undermine the position of his opponent by satire and scorn. Brilliant in invective, the abbot of Clairvaux asserted, in 1140, his claim to a title of equal but different erudition. Learning was not the monopoly of the scholars: the spirituales, too, had their own form of erudition,197 the rights of which Bernard afﬁrmed on the basis of a personal authority that was shaken in 1148. Unlike Innocent II eight years earlier, Eugenius III refused to judge the case brought against Gilbert of Poitiers until his impugned writings were to hand. A clear reprimand to the prosecution, scarcely acquainted with the works it sought to censure. Imagine the scene at the consistory of 1148 when Gilbert and his supporters appeared, bearing piles of patristic texts, which were read aloud.198 An army of authorities was marshaled against the slim schedula drawn up by Bernard and his allies. Expounding the patristic tradition he had adduced, the bishop of Poitiers insisted that the doctrine of the faith be determined not through the initiative, or by the will, of a faction led by a selfappointed inquisitor but on the basis of evidence set out in extenso and analyzed. The presentation of his defense exempliﬁed academic thoroughness; and if compassion may be felt for the pope, bored by its prolixity,199 the effect was durable. Collections of testimonies to Gilbert’s orthodoxy, in the form of a dialogue between the reader and the defendant, were formed in the wake of the trial, aligning his contested views with the sources to which they referred or from which they derived. Introduced by a bitter denunciation of those ignoramuses who had attacked what they failed to comprehend,200 evidence was massed against Bernard and his followers, who did not fail to respond in kind. Even the egregious Walter of Saint-Victor, often dismissed for his gross polemic, took the trouble to equip his Contra quatuor labyrinthos Franciae with a dossier of documentation.201 197 Cf. H. Feiss, OSB, “Bernardus Scholasticus: The Correspondence of Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St. Victor on Baptism,” in Bernardus Magister, ed. J. R. Summerfeldt, Cistercian Studies 135 (Citeaux, 1992), pp. 349– 80. 198 Gesta Frederici 1, 59, p. 250 and cf. 1, 50, pp. 224ff. 199 “Cumque huiuscemodi sermone seu legendi prolixitate dies detineretur, tamquam tedio affectus Romanus inquit antistes: ‘Multa, frater, dicis—multa et ea fortassis, que a nobis non intelliguntur, legi facis; sed simpliciter a te cognoscere velim, anne illam summam essentiam, qua tres personas proﬁteris unum Deum, credas esse Deum?’” Ibid., 1, 59, p. 250. 200 “Quidam penitus, quae scripserat, ignorantes sine arcium veritate logici, sine philosophiae notitia philosophi, sine ﬁde Catholici ex invidia tabescentes, ex superbia praesumentes in commentum, quod super hoc opus [Boethius, De Trinitate] fecerat.” Vatican lat. 561, fol. 171r. 201 See P. Glorieux, “Le Contra quantuor labyrinthos Franciae de Gauthier de Saint-Victor,” AHDLM 27 (1952), pp. 187– 335.

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The point was not that Walter, attempting to lend a systematic air to his tirades, only succeeded in proving his ineptness at theological debate.202 He had grasped that the mode, the style, the method of argumentation had altered, and that heresy now had to be assessed in stricter terms because it had become a focal point of dissent within the church. When Walter’s hero Bernard emphasized the distinctness of the ordo clericalis and the ordo laicalis,203 he voiced a wish to conﬁne the struggle to those qualiﬁed to participate in it, and this desire was shared by Gilbert of Poitiers. His declaration at Reims that, before 1148, he had “spoken openly to the world” (palam mundo) “in schools and churches and had taught nothing in secret”204 was more than a defense from the charge that he had attempted to promote the arcane beliefs of a sect. Gilbert was dissociating himself from Abelard, who had used the same adverb in his Apologia ﬁdei “universis.”205 Yielding nothing on the orthodoxy of his teachings, Gilbert of Poitiers was anxious to stress that, in propounding them, he had remained within an approved ecclesiastical context. Outside it prowled Bernard, inveighing against the gigantes philosophi who dared to lay down the law.206 Useful when they posed no threat to his magisterium—as at Reims where the “masters in the schools” were listed, as witnesses forming a category to themselves, after the archbishops and abbots present207 —they were to be denounced when they overstepped the bounds of their order and bore a resemblance to the abbot of Clairvaux. Depicted as a ﬁsher of men by his biographers, his apostolic image differed little from Abelard’s.208 Both these monks active outside the cloister castigated worldly bishops and mocked pseudo-dialecticians. If Abelard took as his inspiration John the Baptist, it was consequent that Bernard compared him with Herod, because he coveted the prophetic part for himself. In the struggle for primacy between these two reluctant twins, the victor of 1140 began to acquire some of the scholar’s traits, until he was checked at the trial of a more inﬂuential man of learning with support in the curia. This left Bernard with an unresolved problem.

202 Cf. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard, pp. 183 and 273 and Glorieux, “Mauvaise action et mauvais travail. Le Contra quatuor labyrinthos Franciae,” RTAM 21 (1954), pp. 179–93. 203 See H. Walter, SJ, “Bernhard von Clairvaux und die Laien. Aussagen der monastischen Theologie über Ort und Berufung des Laien in der erlösten Welt,” Scholastik 34 (1959), pp. 163–89. And see above, p. 12. 204 Historia Pontiﬁcalis 10, p. 22. 205 See above, p. 71. 206 Sermo 40 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 6, ed. Leclercq and Rochais, p. 235. 207 Vatican Reg. lat. 278, fols. 72v–73r. Cf. F. Pelster, S.J., “Petrus Lombardus und die Verhandlungen über die Streitfrage des Gilbertus Porreta in Paris (1148) and Reims,” in Miscellanea Lombardiana (Novara, 1957), pp. 65 –73. 208 See above, p. 70.

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After the sacred college had opposed him at Reims, reminding Eugenius III of collegiality209 and censuring the abbot of Clairvaux’s attempt to deﬁne the doctrines of the faith as a “rash novelty” to be resisted and “insolence” to be punished, Bernard replied in the De consideratione, insisting that the cardinals derived their authority from the pope. What could be more absurd than for a cardinal-deacon to take precedence over a priest? Neither tradition nor sense warranted such a claim.210 And while Eugenius III enjoyed plenitudo potestatis over the bishops who shared responsibility (sollicitudo) for the church, the unique and supreme shepherd was to view himself as a mother or a brother. Wielding a hoe, not a scepter, he should eradicate error.211 The hoe of De consideratione recalls the trowel and mattock of the letter Bernard sent to the curia in the year of Eugenius’ election.212 That delicate weeder in the monastic garden was now to become the prophetic winnower in the hortus of the Lord. In 1145 Bernard had addressed the cardinals in tones of superiority that were difﬁcult to sustain after he had been taken down a peg. Seeking to repay the curia in kind, he recurred, in his sermons, to the case of Gilbert of Poitiers. Everyone, at the “council” of Reims, had considered the bishop’s commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate “perverse” and “suspect,” asserted Bernard,213 but far be it from him to return to attack an opponent who (he claimed) had acknowledged his fault. The animus was directed against those who continued to adhere to Gilbert’s mistakes.214 Representing as closed, by himself and to his satisfaction, issues that the consistory of 1148 had left open, the irked abbot of Clairvaux sought to reformulate his position, styling himself an ethical philosopher in the tradition of Ambrose and Anselm.215 That is why, in De consideratione, Bernard treated more fully the issues of measure, degree, and proportion touched on, summarily, in his writings of 1140–41. Again posing the problem in terms of Wisdom 11:21,216 he modiﬁed the simpliﬁcations of his polemic against Abelard. “The faith has no ambiguity,” he declared (5, 6); nor was its involucrum susceptible to 209 Acta pontiﬁcium Romanorum inedita 1, ed. J. v. Pﬂuck-Harting (Tübingen, 1881), p. 187 (no. 204). See N. Zacour, “The Cardinals’ View of the Papacy, 1150 –1300,” in The Religious Roles of the Papacy: Ideals and Realities 1050 –1300, ed. W. Ryan (Toronto, 1989), pp. 413–38. 210 De consideratione 4,4,9 and 4,5,16 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 3, pp. 455 and 461. 211 See W. H. Principe, “Monastic, Episcopal, and Apologetic Theology of the Papacy, 1150–1250,” in The Religious Roles of the Papacy, pp. 118 –29 with further bibliography. 212 See above, p. 121. 213 Sermo 80 in Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, p. 282,8ff. 214 Ibid., p. 283,4ff. 215 See B. Michel, “La Philosophie: Le Cas du De consideratione,” in Bernard de Clairvaux. Histoire, mentalités, spiritualité, pp. 579 – 603. 216 See above, p. 98.

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the rational methods of intellectus. Appropriating the language of the “philosopher-heretics,” he now spelled out criteria opposed to theirs: unvarnished truth (aeque et nuda), equivalent to perfect happiness, and a sense of mystery beyond the ken of profane curiositas.217 Understanding “without covering” (sine involucro) was not to be found on this side of the grave. Obscuritas was inherent in the nature of faith. Paradox was unavoidable if one attempted, in imperfect human terms, to convey the incommensurable. There ratio faltered, and involucrum had to prevail. Transposing the scholars’ categories of analysis into the language of mysticism, Bernard abandoned the satire that had lent edge to his writing. David and Goliath disappeared from the scene. Lazarus took their place as a ﬁgure of tearful contemplation that sought, through the four cardinal virtues, union with the divine. Temperateness of tone disguising the aggressiveness of the strategy, Bernard’s De consideratione offered an alternative to the position occupied by suspect philosophi. Not reconciliation but a kind of rapprochement took place between them and their foe in the last years of his life. When the future saint turned to hagiography218 and wrote, in 1149–50, the life of Malachy, bishop of Armagh, who had died at Clairvaux and in whose habit its abbot was to be buried, he took pains to emphasize that sanctity did not exclude learning. In litteratura Malachy had been a youthful prodigy. If he rejected the liberal arts that once attracted him, the reason was that he recognized their practitioners were the blind leading the blind. Gathering to themselves hordes of duped disciples, they were capable of taking in almost everyone—except Malachy. He saw through them, and devoted himself to preaching, reform, and contemplation.219 A more plausible prophet than Gerhoch of Reichersberg and a lesson for the likes of Gilbert, the bishop from Ireland personiﬁed the spirit of sanctity lacking in the present age.220 Then, in Malachy’s homeland as elsewhere, there was a “slackening of ecclesiastical discipline, a spinelessness in censorship, a vacuity of religion.”221 The denunciation was familiar, the allusion evident. Writing the 217 Cf. P. Zerbi, “Introduzione al De Consideratione di San Bernardo,” in id., “Ecclesia in hoc mondo posito,” Studi di stori e di storiagraﬁa medioevale (Milan, 1993), pp. 423 and 436– 37. 218 See W. v. den Steinen, “Heilige als Hagiographen,” in id., Menschen im Mittelalter. Gesammelte Forschungen, Betrachtungen, Bilder, ed. P. v. Moos (Berne, 1967), pp. 7– 31. 219 Vita Sancti Malachiae Episcopi, 1,1,2; 2,4, ed. O. Dwyer et al. in Bernhard von Clairvaux. Sämtliche Werke lateinisch / deutsch 1 (Innsbruck, 1990), p. 460,3 –25; 462,10 –21; 313,3–4 with J. Maddox, “St. Bernard as Hagiographer,” Cîteaux. Commentarii Cistercienses 27 (1976), pp. 85 –108. 220 Vita Malachiae, praefatio, p. 454. 221 “. . . dissolutio ecclesiasticae disciplinae, censurae enervatio, religionis evacuatio.” Ibid., 9,19, p. 500.

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Life of Malachy, Bernard was referring to his contemporaries and himself in terms that had been employed by William of Saint-Thierry.222 In William’s eyes, a revelation of heaven on earth and, in Schiller’s, a ruthless monastic bonehead,223 this mercurial animal of ecclesiastical politics responded to the temper of the times with a mixture of determination and adaptability. Unyielding to his opponents, yet capable of adopting and varying, to his own purposes, their criteria, the “philosophical” Bernard became, in his last years, a version of those whom he condemned. Neither monk nor layman, he found consistency in a paradox susceptible to multiple interpretations. One of them—implicit in the twelfth-century dialectic about heresy, forgotten by posterity, but favored by his opponents—deserves mention. If it follows that, judged by the standards of Saint Bernard, Abelard was heretical, then, by the same institutional logic, so was the abbot of Clairvaux. 222

See above. William: “Mansi . . . indignus ego cum eo . . . mirans quasi coelos me videre novos et terram novam.” Vita Bernardi 1, 7, 34, in PL 185, 247C with A. M. Piazzoni, “Le premier biographe de Saint Bernard,” in Vies et légendes de Saint Bernard, pp. 3 –18. Schiller: “Er [Bernard] war das Orakel seiner Zeit und beherrschte sie, ob er gleich und eben darum weil er bloß ein Privatmann blieb, und andere auf dem ersten Posten stehen ließ. Päbste waren seine Schüler und Könige seine Creaturen. Er haßte und unterdrückte nach Vermögen alles Strebende, und beförderte die dickste Mönchsdummheit, auch war er selbst nur ein Mönchskopf und besaß nichts als Klugheit und Heucheley; aber es ist eine Freude, ihn verherrlicht zu sehen.” Letter to Goethe, 17 March 1802, in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, 31: Briefwechsel 1, ed. S. Ormanns (Weimar, 1985), p. 117,21–28. Discussed by U. Köpf, “Bernhard von Clairvaux: Mystiker und Politker,” in Aufbruch—Wandel—Erneuerung. Beiträge zur “Renaissance” des 12. Jahrhunderts, 9. Blaubeurer Symposion vom 9. bis 11. Oktober 1992, ed. G. Wieland (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1995), pp. 239 – 59. 223

H

H

V SOFT BEATINGS

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T

HE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, ignoring the advice of those better informed, followed his head, with the result that he caused terrible suffering and travail to himself and his followers, to king and kingdom, to the clergy and the people,”1 declared Hilary, bishop of Chichester, in November 1164, when an embassy sent by King Henry II of England to plead for the deposition of Thomas Becket was received by Pope Alexander III and the curia. “And that was certainly neither ﬁtting nor proper for a man of such great authority, nor would it ever have been proper.”2 Misconstruing the impersonal verb of his insistence (oportuebat), Hilary droned on: “Furthermore it would not have been ﬁtting for his followers, had they been sensible, to connive with him in such matters.”3 At this mixture of verbosity and error, the papal court dissolved in laughter.4 Less pompous was the Earl of Arundel who, speaking on behalf of the laymen, won the sympathies of his critical listeners by declaring that “we illiterates do not understand a word of what the bishops have said.”5 With an eloquence denied to the episcopate, he presented a measured and modest case, in the vernacular, for papal intercession to settle the dispute between Henry II and Becket. Arundel was universally praised for his discernment (discretio). This secular emissary of the king of England had been shrewd enough to defer to the authority of the pope. Alexander III and the curia imparted the ambassadors a lesson on the theme of Luke 1:52: the proud humbled, and the lowly exalted. Hilary of Chichester was not its ﬁrst recipient. When Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Lon1 “. . . dominus Cantuariensis, dum relicto maturiori consilio se solum constituit, et sic sibi et suis, regi et regno, clero et populo, graviores labores procuravit et angustias. . . .” Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita S. Thomae, in Materials for the History of Archbishop Thomas Becket 2, ed. J. Robertson, Rolls Series 67 (reprint Wiesbaden, 1965), p. 338. See D. Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Thomas Becket (Cambridge, 1951), p. 94 and id., Thomas Becket (London, 1970), pp. 105ff. 2 “‘Et certe virum tantae auctoritatis id non decuit, nec oportuit, nec aliquando oportuebat’.” Vita, p. 338. 3 “‘Insuper suos, si saperent, non oportuerit sibi in talibus praebuisse assensum’.” Ibid., p. 338. 4 “Audito itaque qualiter facundus ille grammaticae prosiliret de portu in portum, soluti sunt in risum universi.” Ibid., p. 338. 5 “‘Quod locuti fuerint episcopi nos illiterati penitus ignoramus’.” Ibid., p. 339.

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don, opened the scene with an intemperate tirade against Becket, whose see he had allegedly coveted,6 he was interrupted by the pope: “Be merciful, brother.” “Lord, I shall be merciful to him,” Foliot had replied with conﬁdence. “I do not say, brother, that you should be merciful to him,” came the papal rejoinder, “but to yourself.”7 The servant of God’s servants was concise: the proud prelate bombastic. Reminding Gilbert Foliot of the virtue of charity, Alexander III put him in his place. And Hilary of Chichester, although an able canon-lawyer,8 was derided not only because he misconjugated oportere but also on account of his multiloquium.9 If he touched on one of the few points where Becket’s friends and enemies were in agreement—the archbishop’s tendency to heed only his own counsel10 —this windbag made the mistake of underestimating an audience made up of curiales who cultivated urbanity, point, and wit. Polished in tone, exact in speech, they were determined in defense of papal primacy; and while the Earl of Arundel was applauded for the modesty with which he played the role of the bluff outsider, the English members of their own order, acting in what were perceived as the king’s interests, alienated these cosmopolitan clerics by their overbearing manner. Gilbert erred in vehemence, and Hilary’s solecisms were not only grammatical. Language, style, and deportment mattered in the sophisticated milieu of the papal court, to which one of Becket’s ablest advisers had belonged. John of Salisbury had served in, and frequently visited, the Roman curia. Before becoming secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, more than a decade spent in the schools of France had also prepared him, better than Becket, for the international culture of the church. More scholarly than the English primate whom the bishops of London and Chichester attacked, and more prudent, he was, during Becket’s lifetime, one of the principal spokesmen and apologists of the future saint. Yet John did not aim to become the hagiographer of his headstrong patron. Becket’s intractability compelled him and, having ﬂed the murderers in the cathedral, he rallied to the archbishop after his death. From a modest family and background, John followed a path that was intended to lead to ecclesiastical preferment. His point of departure was Paris, nascent center of teaching and learning;11 and there he had luck. 6 Gilbert Foliot and His Letters, ed. A. Morey and C.N.L. Brooke (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 149ff. 7 “ . . . dominus papa: ‘Parce’, inquit, ‘frater.’ Et Londoniensis: ‘Domine, parcam ei.’ Et dominus papa: ‘Non dico, frater, quod parcas ei, sed tibi’.” Vita, p. 338. 8 Knowles, Episcopal Colleagues, pp. 24ff. 9 See above, p. 4. 10 See below, pp. 189–90. 11 Cf. R. Southern, “The Schools of Paris and the Schools of Chartres,” in Renaissance and Renewal, pp. 113 – 37.

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Among the masters at whose feet John sat, during the years 1136 –48, numbered celebrities of twelfth-century scholarship.12 Master Alberic and Robert of Melun, William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres, Gilbert of Poitiers, Robert Pullen, and others are loudly praised and snidely criticized by their pupil in the Metalogicon, which he dedicated to Becket in 1159. The roll call of their names established John’s descent from a distinguished lineage of experts and suggested his competence in all branches of knowledge (except the law).13 He was trained to pronounce on the aims and the reality of a uniﬁed culture, which he exempliﬁed in the complementary ﬁgures of Gilbert of Poitiers and Bernard of Chartres.14 These heroes of two of his works, Historia Pontiﬁcalis and Metalogicon, embodied, in their teaching, an ideal of comprehensive learning which John went on to practice outside the schools. This “nonprofessional” intellectual, after leaving Paris, had no students; and his informal pupil was a worldly chancellor before embarking on an archiepiscopal career that was to end with a martyr’s crown. Ill equipped for the high ofﬁce he was to hold, Becket needed not the erudition of the ivory tower but applied learning that would enable him to perform his duties and to hold his own in the controversies he provoked. To controversy John was accustomed. It had marked the approach, and the life, of his ﬁrst and most colorful master. With Peter Abelard, on Mont Sainte-Geneviève, he had begun his studies in 1136; and what he said, twenty-three years later in the Metalogicon, about that teacher is signiﬁcant for its ambiguities and its omissions. About the theological works that had allegedly been expounded, by the heretic recondemned in 1141, to throngs of the young like John himself, there is never a word in that work.15 Only Abelard the dialectician and logician makes an appearance in the Metalogicon; and there the “famous,” “admirable,” “preeminent” doctor of those subjects is depicted as ﬁlling John with misplaced enthusiasm.16 Dialectic, for him as for others, was a false start.17 After Abelard’s departure, John persevered with two masters, whom he describes with a characteristic mixture of respect and irony. One of them went to Bologna, where he “untaught what he had taught” and, return12 Metalogicon 1,24, ed. J. B. Hall, CCCM 98 (Turnhout, 1991), pp. 51– 55 and cf. 2,10, ibid., pp. 70–73. Cf. Southern, Scholastic Humanism, (Oxford, 1995), p. 214–21; O. Weijers, “The Chronology of John of Salisbury’s Studies in France,” in The World of John of Salisbury, p. 109–16, and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and Education in TwelfthCentury Paris, from the Account of His Metalogicon,” History of Universities 6 (1986), pp. 1–45 and “The Chronology of John of Salisbury’s Studies in France: A Reading of Metalogicon 2,10,” SM, 3a ser. 28 (1987), pp. 193 –203. 13 C. Brooke, “John of Salisbury and His World,” in World of John of Salisbury, p. 7. 14 On Gilbert, see above, pp. 123ff.; on Bernard, see below, pp. 153ff. 15 See Luscombe, School of Abelard, p. 52 and nn. 3 – 6 16 Metalogicon 2,10, p. 70,1– 8. 17 Cf. R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Uniﬁcation of Europe, 1: Foundations (Oxford, 1995), p. 215.

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ing to Paris, did the reverse. “Whether better, those may judge who heard him before and after.” Alberic and Robert of Melun, with whom John studied dialectic, were subtle, swift, and agile in debate. Both would have been eminent philosophers, “had they possessed a broad base in literature and been as inclined to follow in the footsteps of the maiores as they were to applaud their own inventions.”18 Self-congratulation, ignorance of scholarly tradition, and narrow knowledge are the attributes of the Corniﬁciani, enemies of culture attacked in the Metalogicon.19 John’s unidentiﬁed opponents thus bear an uncanny resemblance to his teachers—and not only to them. For two whole years, he emphasizes, he adhered to these masters (illis adhaesi) and was thoroughly practiced (exercitatus) in their methods. Overestimating his competence, he considered himself a scholar, because he could repeat what Alberic and Robert had taught him. On his own account a superﬁcial ignoramus and a limited specialist, John of Salisbury, between 1136 and 1138, had many of the attributes of his bêtes noires. Castigating the “Corniﬁcians,” he was ﬂailing his former self. Then he experienced a conversion and came to his senses. Reversus in me and mistrustful of his own powers, John transferred to the grammaticus William of Conches. “In the meantime I read much and will never regret that time which I spent.” The language, in contrast to his heated invectives against the Corniﬁciani, is cool and sober. Grammatica provided the core of John’s education under William, complemented and extended by the teaching of Richard Bishop, “an expert in almost every discipline.” If Richard and William were failures, “vanquished by the rush of the ignorant multitude,” as Metalogicon 1,24 recounts, John, in his exceptional ability to beneﬁt from their lesson, was to be set apart from his erring contemporaries. It followed that, because he alone remained a faithful pupil of these masters, he might also be viewed as their heir. It does not follow (despite a long and confused debate20) that John of Salisbury asserted or implied that he had been educated at Chartres. His point was less to establish the geographical location of his studies than to underscore his singularity. With the ardor of a convert from “Corniﬁcianism,” he represented himself as the sole beneﬁciary, at Paris, of the legacy of William, Richard, and the senex Bernard. 18

Metalogicon 2, 10, p. 71, 9 – 40. See P. von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 250ff.; H. Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism, in The Life and Works of John of Salisburg (London, 1950), p. 90ff.; J. O. Ward, “The Date of the Commentary on Cicero’s ‘De inventione’ by Thierry of Chartres (c. 1045 –1160?) and the Corniﬁcian Attack on the Liberal Arts,” Viator 4 (1972), pp. 219 – 37; E. Tachella, “Giovanni di Salisbury e i Corniﬁciani,” Sandalion 3 (1980), pp. 273 – 313; and F. Alessio, Studi e ricerche di ﬁlosoﬁa medievale (Pavia, 1961), pp. 3 –12. 20 Summarized by P. Dronke, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome, 1992), pp. 15–40 and Southern, Scholastic Humanism, pp. 61–101, especially 88ff. 19

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Bernard of Chartres stood at the center of what is made to appear a didactic movement that resisted hasty preparation and crude utilitarianism. Gilbert of Poitiers and William Conches defended this position, as did Abelard.21 Opposing the error of those “madmen” who did not wish to waste time on what seemed to them the tedious trivia of grammatica, these defenders of an integrated culture were considered fools until their work bore fruit. John’s praise, so warm yet so ambiguous, is qualiﬁed by the context in which it is placed. Abelard, who “was thought to have sole access to Aristotle’s opinions,”22 is aligned with Anselm of Laon and his brother Ralph. They were criticized only by “heretics and vile criminals”—not, of course, by the author of the Historia calamitatum, who states that he had made his name by attacking them, before being proscribed himself in 1121. Alberic of Reims, assailed in the Theologia christiana and Theologia “scholarium,” became a laughingstock; William of Champeaux was convicted of error on the basis of his own writings. Only religion, learning, or their standing in the church protected Hugh of Saint-Victor and Robert Pullen from ridicule. Portraying himself a dutiful pupil in contrast to the self-proclaimed autodidacts of his age, John of Salisbury rewrites the philosophical history of the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century. Uniting Abelard and his enemies, open or covert, in a common opposition to the “Corniﬁcians,” he constructs an implausible tradition that sags beneath the weight of its contradictions. Polemic against Anselm and Alberic, tensions with the Victorines William and Hugh, and no love lost for Bernard’s protégé Pullen had contributed to the debacles of Soissons and Sens. “If no one emerged unscathed” from disparaging a master like Anselm of Laon, as the Metalogicon asserts,23 its author was well aware that the prime instance of his own theory was none other than his teacher Abelard. “Corniﬁcius,” therefore, was not only the foe from outside this “tradition” but also the enemy within. Subversive in the past, he was no less dangerous in the present. Abelard, “caught out” (deprehensus) in suspect views on the nature of universals, had produced “devotees and followers” (sectatores et testes).24 The whiff of heresy in John’s diction is not dispelled by his ambiguous assertion, “They are my friends.” For in the unholy ofﬁce of their hermeneutics, “they generally so torment the texts they hold captive, that even the harshest of spirits would be moved to pity for them.”25 Torture, imprisonment, and distortion: the ﬁgurative language of inquisi21

Metalogicon 1,5, pp. 20ff. Ibid., p. 20,13 –15. 23 Cf. Otto of Freising, Gesta Frederici I,50, p. 224. 24 Metalogicon 2,17, p. 81,22–24. 25 “Amici mei sunt, licet ita plerumque captivatam detorqueant litteram, ut vel durior animus miseratione illius moveatur.” Ibid., p. 81,24 –26. 22

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tion recalls John’s other teacher, Robert of Melun, describing how Abelard had been misrepresented, in terms that echoed his own.26 With the fanaticism of wrongheaded disciples, Abelard’s pupils compounded the mistakes of their mentor. And these epigonoi resembled the students of Adam of Balsam, who boasted that discoveries made by their predecessors were their own, dropped the name of Robert of Melun, and verbosely corrected the mistakes of Abelard. So John satirized them in the Entheticus maior (v. 49ff.),27 distinguishing their approach, foolish or fraudulent, from his own enlightened method. Lovers of novelty and despisers of the ancients, paying no attention to method or to order, they confected, from various tongues, a nonsense babble. Their pretensions were matched by the sterility of those fellow-students whom John was to ﬁnd, years later, when he returned to Mont Sainte-Geneviève, unaltered and bickering about the same problems in the same place.28 He had learned the lesson of the individualist Abelard. Establishing a caesura between himself and his contemporaries, John of Salisbury disputed their capacity for moral advancement, intellectual progress, and acknowledgment of error. Rejecting the routes taken by them, he had neither lapsed into epigonality nor proclaimed his originality but had followed William of Conches and Richard Bishop. Spurned by the ignorant or arrogant members of his own generation, from whom John dissociated himself, they had left a legacy that he now claimed in solitary splendor. Alienation insinuates uniqueness at the opening of the Metalogicon, in a topos of envy. Against the criticism of scholars and those who are, or profess to be, philosophers, measures can be taken, but no escape is possible from the mordacity of fellow courtiers.29 Setting himself apart from the company that he keeps at Canterbury, John seeks the attention of those to whose number he no longer belongs: the philosophantes and the scolares. An intellectual poised between two worlds—that of learning, with which he feels a deeper afﬁnity, and that of the archiepiscopal court, where malice is rife—he defers to the more able and eminent (potiores, praestantiores) who will complete a work that he submits to their better judgment. Among these pirouettes of ambivalence, one stance is maintained: indignation at the contempt in which the opera logicorum were held. Who were these logici? “Logicians” or “masters of the word”?30 The equivocal26

See above, p. 118. Ed. J. van Laarhoven, John of Salisbury’s Entheticus Maior and Minor (Leiden, 1987), 1, p. 108 with ibid., 2, pp. 263 – 65. 28 Metalogicon 2,10, p. 72,82– 83 - 73,85 – 96. 29 “omnino non possem concurialium dentes evadere,” Prol., ibid., p. 9. 30 For the term see P. Michaud-Quantin, “L’Emploi des termes logica et dialectica au Moyen Age,” in id., Etudes sur le vocabulaire philosophique du Moyen Age, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo 5 (Rome, 1992), pp. 59 –72. 27

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ity of the title chosen for John’s work emerges in this context: the Metalogicon, commonly taken to be an attack on logic-chopping, is, at the same time, a defense of the verbal arts, which he places at the heart of his book. Apologizing for the disorderly manner in which it is presented, John attributes the blame to external factors: leisure was lacking; family worries were pressing; and the trivial occupations of courtly life consumed what time remained after he had discharged his weighty responsibilities for the “ecclesiastical affairs of all Britain.”31 With this denial of his capacity to satisfy any type of reader, John suggests his adequacy to them all. A clerical potentate (here may be detected more than a little exaggeration), conscientious in his duties but reluctant to fritter away his time with frivolities, this busy administrator styles himself an academicus, a sceptic, who does not pronounce on truth or falsehood but is “satisﬁed with probability alone.”32 Feigning limited competence and lowly aims, this antidialectical dialectician on the model of Abelard in fact stakes out comprehensive claims.33 They are directed at the moderni, in many respects preferable to the ancients.34 Nobility of intellect, subtlety of research, diligent application, inventiveness, the ready and eloquent word: all these qualities distinguish others—unspeciﬁed—but not him. His level is more modest. Hurried and harassed, he seeks to avoid ignorance, falsehood, assertiveness. No, John of Salisbury, unlike certain of his teachers and most of their pupils, is neither overbearing nor presumptuous. Satisﬁed with the approximations of probability, he will merely entertain his readers—courtiers, philosophers, and scholars—on the topics of language and literature, logic, ethics, and mores. If posteriority celebrates him, like his more deserving contemporaries, the reason will not be that he has sought fame. Self-effacing, defen31 “Placuit itaque sociis, ut hoc ipsum tumultuario sermone dictarem, cum nec ad sententias subtiliter examinandas, nec ad uerba expolienda studium superesset aut otium. Necessariis enim occupationibus uix aliquid amplius deducebatur quam refectionis hora uel somni, cum ex mandato domini mei, cui deesse non possum, sollicitudo totius Britanniae, quod ad causas ecclesiasticas, mihi incumbat. Ad haec sollicitudo rei familiaris et curiales nugae studium excludebant. Amicorum interpellatio me fere totum absorbuerat.” Metalogicon, p. 10. 32 See M. dal Pra, Giovanni di Salisbury (Milan, 1951), pp. 64 – 93. 33 “De moribus uero non nulla scienter inserui, ratus omnia quae leguntur aut scribuntur inutilia esse, nisi quatenus afferunt aliquod adminiculum uitae. Est enim quaelibet professio philosophandi inutilis et falsa, quae se ipsam in cultu uirtutis et uitae exhibitione non aperit. Academicus in his, quae sunt dubitabilia sapienti, non iuro uerum esse, quod loquor, sed seu uerum seu falsum sit, sola probabilitate contentus sum.” Metalogicon, p. 11. See further below, p.163. 34 “Nec dedignatus sum modernorum proferre sententias, quos antiquis in plerisque praeferre non dubito. Spero equidem quod gloriam eorum, qui nunc sunt, posteritas celebrabit, eo quod multorum nobilia mirer ingenia, inuestigandi subtilitatem, diligentiam studii, felicitatem memoriae, fecunditatem mentis et oris facultatem et copiam uerbi.” Ibid., p. 11.

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sive, and doubting, the academicus merely offers a modest proposal about the nature of life and of letters. . . . A variant on the theme of concordantia artium begins to emerge from the manner in which John of Salisbury, emphasizing his humility, assumes the part of the cultural critic without a base in the centers of higher learning. Avoiding the dangerous subject of theology, he seeks refuge in his own version of dialectic. Dialectic presupposes an opponent, and the Metalogicon accordingly takes the form of a counterattack against the “Corniﬁcian calumny” of denying the utility of the study of language and literature. The threat posed by these adversaries serves to deﬂect attention from John’s neglect of the highest of disciplines and to justify his championship of the lowest, grammatica. Antithesis, often amounting to paradox, was therefore essential to create a sense of emergency in which his own views might prevail. For the litigiousness, strife, and spite which John attributes to the Corniﬁciani, his Metalogicon (I,1) substitutes a traditional image of Philology’s marriage with Mercury35 and Cicero’s view (De inventione I,2, 2–3) of eloquence as the basis of the liberal arts, social harmony, and civilization. Criticizing the study of the trivium, “Corniﬁcius” undermines the foundations of civil and political life. In their defense John argues not for the intrinsic value of linguistic and literary pursuits, but for their applicability. His underlying premise is the unity of grammatica with ethica;36 and its logical consequence, for those who deny the connection, is to be censured as ignorant and immoral. Immorality, as practiced by the enemies of the verbal arts, is detectable in their misuse of language. Less eloquent than verbose, the Corniﬁciani strew “the leaves of words in the wind.”37 Such had been the complaints of Abelard, William of Conches, and Robert of Melun against the quibblings of the logic-choppers; such were to be the mistakes made by Hilary of Chichester and Gilbert Foliot. Yet the point, at Metalogicon I,3, is more speciﬁc; and it is illuminated by a passage from Bernardus Silvestris’s commentary on Virgil. In his glosses on the leaves to which the Sibyl, at Aeneid 6.74–75, is urged by the poem’s hero not to entrust her songs, lest they be scattered by the winds, Bernardus remarks: TO THE LEAVES: to unstable and wandering masters, who are roaming and straying about . . .

35 See G. Nuchelmans, “Philologia et son mariage avec Mercure jusqu’ à la ﬁn du xiie siècle,” Latomus 16 (1957), pp. 84 –107. 36 See Delhaye, “‘Grammatica’ et ‘Ethica’ au xiie siècle.” 37 “Si quidem non facundus est sed verbosus et sine fructu sensuum, verborum folia in ventum continue profert.” Metalogicon 1,3, p. 15.

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TO THE WINDS: to the vices of instability the Sybil does [not] entrust her songs, since understanding does not mold and instruct by means of unstable teachers.38

Leaves and wind, peripatetics of scholarship, gypsies of learning straying from the path of meaning and sense: the image, derived from Virgil and from Job (10:1), in both Bernardus Silvestris and John of Salisbury, is directed against a common foe. It may be an argument for the availability, at least in the form of students’ recollectae, of the Commentum in Northern France by 1148,39 the date of John’s departure from Paris, and it is certainly a reaction to a shared dilemma. The unsettled intellectuals whom both John and Bernard criticize are attached neither to a cathedral school nor to an episcopal court. Roving opportunists, they are blown, as they blow, with the wind. The problems they set are insoluble; their language uncouth; they despise poets and historians and mock those who pay attention to antiquity. The coherence of study is destroyed, a community of research disintegrates: “Everyone concentrates on his own ﬁndings or on those of his teacher.” These products of rapid and borrowed learning, however, are not slow to reject their own masters. “New sects are founded; philosophers are confected at an instant.”40 Everything is new: grammar is revised; dialectic transformed; rhetoric condemned; the quadrivium follows unfamilar routes and philosophy, old rules abandoned, is reinvented from within. Congruence and reason, divorced from understanding, became the only criteria; and no case can be made without explicit statement of the argument. Ex arte et de arte agere idem erat:41 practice is replaced by theory; the poet is unable to versify without specifying his meter; language has become a mishmash (sartago loquendi)—in short, ignorant specialism with universal pretensions, leav38 “FOLIIS: INSTABILIBUS ET GIROVAGIS MAGISTRIS, QUI SUNT VAGI ET PALANTES. Ventis: viciis instabilitatis Sibilla foliis carmina [non] mandat, quoniam intelligentia per instabiles preceptores preceptis suis non informat.” The Commentary on the First Six Books of the “Aeneid” of Virgil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. J. W. Jones and E. F. Jones (Lincoln, 1977), p. 49, 1– 4. For the proposal non, by W. Riedel, see Jones and Jones app. ad. loc. and cf. Aeneid 6.74 –75. On the ascription see best S. Gersh, “(Pseudo-?) Bernard Silvestris and the Revival of Neo-Platonic Virgilian Exegesis,” in Sophies Maietores: Chercheurs de sagesse. Hommage à J. Pépin, ed. M.-O. Goulet-Gazé (Paris, 1992), pp. 573 – 93. 39 On the dating see P. Godman, “Ambiguity in the Mathematicus of Bernardus Silvestris,” SM 3a ser., 21 (1990), p. 647. For the tradition see G. Padoan, “Tradizione e fortuna del commento all’ Eneide di Bernardo Silvestre,” IMU 3 (1960), p. 234 and M. Pastore Stocchi, “Per il commento virgiliano di Bernardo Silvestre: un manoscritto e un ipotesi,” Lettere italiane 27 (1975), pp. 75 – 82. 40 “Suis enim aut magistri, sui quisque incumbebat inventis . . . , ut et ipsi spretis his, quae a doctoribus suis audierant, cuderent et conderent nouas sectas.” Metalogicon 1,3, p. 16. 41 Ibid., p. 17. For the distinction de/ex arte, see Ward, “Thierry of Chartres,” pp. 249ff. and K. Jacobi, “Logic (ii): The Later Twelfth Century,” in Cambridge History, pp. 230ff.

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ing nothing implicit, nothing humane or vital, destroying, in its arid abstractness, a common sense of scholarly endeavor. Such was the opinion that John of Salisbury held of the nouvelle vague in 1159, the bitterness of his view deepened by the perception of similarity between his former self and his present opponents. The utilitarianism of these upstarts represented a debased version of his own standard of moral applicability. Nor did the resemblances end there. Worse still, the “Corniﬁcians” had aspirations to omniscience. “They labor to ﬁnd out about everything and to explain the sum of knowledge,” wrote John, echoing Ecclesiastes 8:17.42 Denouncing those who speculate on the mysteries of the trinity with “irreverent wordiness,”43 increasing scientia while diminishing devotio, and who overstepped the boundaries between the study of language and the pursuit of theology,44 Abelard’s pupil offered a summary of the criticisms made by others of his master. Setting himself apart from the condemned heretic, John was also at pains to distinguish his approach from that of the epigonoi. Self-proclaimed polymaths, Abelard’s imitators were not to be confused with an exponent of integrated learning like him. Asserting that the same goal could be reached by a shorter route, omitting or belittling the path of grammatica, these modern know-it-alls were sweeping in their claims, but narrow in their practice. They had abandoned a catholic comprehensiveness of knowledge to follow their particularist interests. That secta of the twelfth century, according to John, was incapable of sustaining the pressure of its illusions. Some entered monasteries or took orders, others went to Salerno and Montpellier where, after medical studies, they believed that they had become omnicompetent. How could they claim to have grasped the secrets of nature and its hidden passageways (cuniculos), when they were ignorant of the whole of philosophy and unable to speak correctly?45 The quest for wealth drove yet others (like John himself) into the slavery of courtly life. The motives shared by all these “Corniﬁcians”—whether “philosophers” or medics, monks or courtiers—were their avarice, haste, and contempt for “our trivium and the whole of the quadrivium.” What John of Salisbury claimed to have experienced was the fragmentation and prostitution of learning in his own times. These developments are dated. They occurred when Gilbert of Poitiers was chancellor at Chartres (1126–38). But if he had resisted them, as had William of Conches and Abelard, all three had been accused of heresy. An 42 “. . . sollicitantur de omnibus et volunt de universis reddere rationem.” Metalogicon 4,41, p. 182,14. 43 Ibid., p. 182,7– 9. 44 Ibid., p. 182, 9 –10. On Abelard as a teacher of the trivium, see Fredborg, “The Unity of the Trivium,” pp. 330 – 32. 45 Metalogicon 1,4, p. 19.

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orthodox precedent had to be found—a model above suspicion, past or present—to establish John’s ideal of a comprehensive culture on the basis of logica (Metalogicon 1,10). Disenchanted with the failure of the previous generation and dissatisﬁed with his own, he needed to ﬁnd a patron and an emblem for his enterprise stationed at a suitable distance from the present. That is why, with polemic directed at the schools of Paris in which he had studied, he chose a famous master from the provinces whom he had never met. At second hand—from William of Conches, Richard Bishop, and others—John had heard of the charismatic ﬁgure whose memory he now proceeded to refashion to his own purposes. Bernard of Chartres, described as a senex, had advocated a system of graduated difﬁculty adapted to the abilities of those learning the liberal arts (Metalogicon 1,11). Liberal they are called, because they create freedom from care in wisdom (I,12). The ﬁrst of them is logica which, dealing with the verbal skills that John views as fundamental, is linked by him with grammatica, “origin of all the liberal disciplines” (I,13). From the logicians is abstracted the narrow deﬁnition of their subject: “in the broadest sense” (latissime), logica deals with words. Etymology, proclaimed the key to the nature of things, thus justiﬁes John’s widening the scope of the “logician’s” preferred discipline to incorporate the one they despised. Following Quintilian’s example, usage and custom set the measure of correctness (I,16). An afﬁnity posited between language and nature, poetry is subordinated to grammar (I,17). Viewed as prescriptive arts, both express the nature of mores. Here, as in the following chapters, an ethical dimension is attributed to linguistic correctness: “The art is like a public road where everyone has the right to go, to walk, and to act without calumny and violence.”46 Not the byways of the specialists, the deviant paths followed by those who misuse logica and improperly reduce its scope, but the common route of a shared culture, is John’s image of intellectual endeavor. Grammatica, distinguishing the ﬁgures and forms of speech, also determines rules of conduct (I, 20). This is an endless task, for the practice of grammar and the love of reading are coterminous with life (I, 21), as Quintilian states. Patient and responsible attention to the text are therefore required, and John of Salisbury’s hermeneutic accordingly presents analysis as the key to construing the author’s intention—verborum . . . signiﬁcatio diligentius excutienda est.47 “Reading” (legendi verbum), however, is ambiguous. In order to establish the difference between private study and public instruction, John pro46 “Ars itaque est quasi strata publica, qua ire, ambulare, et agere sine calumnia et concussione omnibus ius est.” Ibid., 1,18, p. 43. 47 Ibid., 1,19, p. 46.

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poses, again on Quintilian’s authority, the terms lectio and praelectio.48 From this, one of the clearest distinctions drawn in the twelfth century between the silent scrutiny of a text (ad scrutinium meditantis) and the oral delivery of a lecture, he moves on to the role of the grammaticus, as illustrated by Bernard of Chartres’ teaching. Auctores excutiunt: the verb is John’s favorite to characterize the act of interpretation. It occurs twice at Metalogicon I, 24, the second instance deﬁning the ﬁrst. Excute Virgilium aut Lucanum, et ibi cuiuscumque philosophiae professor sis, eiusdem invenies condituram. To interpret is to shake and examine: “Scrutinize Virgil or Lucan and there, whatever school of thought you profess, you will ﬁnd its seasoning.” Although the idea was ancient, ultimately derived from the Homeric exegesis that located in that poet the foundations of all knowledge,49 in 1159 it amounted to a provocation. From poetry, lowest of the artes that the “Corniﬁcians” were reluctant even to consider studying, the unfashionable grammaticus derives the sum of all types of philosophy. Excute: this key verb, like praelectio, is borrowed from a signiﬁcant passage in the Institutio oratoria (I,4,4). Excutiendum omne scriptorum genus, is the method recommended by Quintilian to achieve the complete formation, including natural science and philosophy, that should be instilled in the perfect orator. Such a training is distinguished from the normal education of the average rhetor. Total and exclusive, it is inaccessible to the majority and attainable only by the few. Described at Institutio oratoria I.10.1 as orbis ille doctrinae, quem Graeci encyclion paidian vocant, it unites the four “mathematical” sciences with the verbal arts. Its aim is to create an imaginem . . . perfecti illius [oratoris] et nulla parte cessantis (ibid. I.10.4), for the ideal orator is to be consummatus undique (I.10.5 and 6). Here is the source of John’s inspiration: “Let [the grammaticus] ‘beat’ the authors and, without provoking laughter from his onlookers, strip them of their plumage that, like little crows, they have taken from different disciplines and dressed up their works with so that their appearance may be more colorful.”50 If the direct allusion is to Horace (Ep. I.3,18–20), behind the interdisciplinary ideal lies the Institutio oratoria. The auctores, according to John’s theory, are neither to be treated with reverence nor studied for themselves. Likened to winged thieves of the wild, they should be 48 See E. Jeauneau, “Jean de Salisbury et la lecture des philosophes,” in World of John of Salisbury, p. 77–108. 49 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship. From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age 1 (Oxford, 1968), p. 167 and R. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian. Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 40 – 41. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 10.1.46. 50 “Auctores excutiat, et sine intuentium risu eos plumis spoliet, quas ad modum corniculae ex uariis disciplinis, ut color aptior sit, suis operibus indiderunt.” Metalogicon 1,24, p. 51.

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despoiled of their borrowed learning. Literature of the past is, for him, the model on which to reconstruct the culture synthesized by the ancients: “The greater the number of disciplines in which each man is steeped, the more copiously he has absorbed them, the more fully will he grasp the exactitude of the auctores, and the more extensively will he teach them. For they, by a diacrisis, which we may call an illustration or portrayal, on taking any unwrought subject provided by a narrative, a theme, or a fable, arranged, embellished, and spiced it with such grace, that it seemed to be a perfected work, as it were an image of all the arts.”51 In these sentences John’s view of the nature and purpose of reading, co-extensive with the lifelong process of learning advocated in the Institutio oratoria, ﬁnds its fullest expression. Behind Bernard’s program, culminating in the phrase opus consummatum, omnium artium . . . imago of Metalogicon I,24, lies the concept of enkyklios paideia outlined in Quintilian’s programmatic ﬁrst book. Shunning the traditional auctores favored by contemporary and previous encyclopedists—Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus, Boethius and Isidore or the second book of Augustine’s De ordine 52 —John of Salisbury drew on the Institutio oratoria.53 Not yet another union of Mercury and Philology, nor a further variant on the familiar theme of reductio omnium artium ad sacram scripturam,54 but a Gesamtkunstwerk was his aim, to be achieved by grammar in partnership with poetry and the other disciplines. The way he intended to accomplish this, is illustrated by the stylistic qualities of his own poetic prose: Imagine Grammar and Poetry in full course, covering the entire surface of the text being interpreted. Onto this ﬁeld (as it is usually called) Logica, in golden gleam, brings its semblances of proof and its methods of reasoning, while Rhetoric, at the points where persuasion is needed, rivals the sheen of silver with the brilliance of its eloquence. Mathematics is borne along by the wheels 51 “Quanto pluribus disciplinis et abundantius quisque imbutus fuerit, tanto elegantiam auctorum plenius intuebitur, planiusque docebit. Illi enim per ‘diacrisim’, quam nos illustrationem siue picturationem possumus appellare, cum rudem materiam historiae aut argumenti aut fabulae aliamue quamlibet suscepissent, eam tanta disciplinarum copia et tanta compositionis et condimenti gratia excolebant, ut opus consummatum omnium artium quodam modo uideretur imago.” Ibid., pp. 51– 52. 52 See I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris, 1984), pp. 101– 204. 53 On Quintilian in the twelfth century, see, best, J. O. Ward, “Quintilian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages,” Rhetorica 13 (1995), pp. 231– 82. Cf. P. Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters 2 (Stuttgart, 1959), pp. 1–29; M. Brasa Diez, “Quintiliano y Juan de Salisbury,” Estudios ﬁlosóﬁcos 24 (1979), pp. 87– 99, and A. Mollard, “La Diffusion médiévale de l’Institution oratoire au xiie siècle,” Le Moyen Age 44 (1934), pp. 161–75 and ibid., 45 (1935), pp. 1–8. 54 F. Simone, “La Reductio artium ad sacram scripturam quale espressione dell’ umanesimo medievale ﬁno al secolo xii,” Convivium 6 (1949), pp. 887– 927.

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of the quadrivium, to which it belongs, pressing hard on the heels of the others, having woven together its delightful materials with manifold variety. Natural Philosophy, after investigating the secrets of the physical world, furnishes from its storehouse a many-sided variety of beguiling arguments. And Ethics, pre-eminent over the other parts of philosophy—without which, I declare, not even the name of philosopher would exist—takes precedence over all the others by virtue of its interdisciplinary grace.55

The interdependence of the artes, for which John of Salisbury so forcefully argues here and elsewhere,56 is exempliﬁed by a diacrisis of the kind mentioned in his previous sentence. Informed by Quintilian’s account of enargeia at Institutio oratoria 8.3.61ff., the personiﬁcations of his illustratio or picturatio ﬁnd analogues in the “synod of the seven liberal arts” described in the prologue to Thierry of Chartres’ Heptateuchon.57 Economy and clarity, the absence of which John laments in the jargon of the Corniﬁcians, are evinced in his own writing. Logica, in this functional sense, is indivisible from rhetoric, grammar, and poetics, for each of these disciplines contributes to the cognitive qualities of perspicuity and precision which others annexed to dialectic. That style should be expressive of sense, had been the lesson of Bernard, “the most fertile source of literature in Gaul of modern times.” His teaching, apportioning secular and sacred instruction to ﬁxed times of the day, was marked by a combination of tolerance and toughness. With the undisciplined debates of his contemporaries, their arid quibbles and sterile pedantry, John contrasts the order of the Chartrian collationes.58 All his nostalgia for a now remote world of learning is palpable in this account of meditative discussions within the cathedral close. Polar opposites of the disputations practiced so contentiously in the schools that John had known, 55 “Siquidem Grammatica Poeticaque se totas infundunt et eius, quod exponitur, totam superﬁciem occupant. Huic (ut dici solet) campo Logica probandi colores afferens suas immittit rationes in fulgore auri, et Rethorica in locis persuasionum et nitore eloquii candorem argenteum aemulatur. Mathematica quadruuii sui rotis uehitur aliarumque uestigiis insistens, colores et uenustates suas multiplici uarietate contexit. Phisica exploratis naturae consiliis de promptuario suo affert multiplicem colorum uenustatem. Illa autem, quae ceteris philosophiae partibus praeminet—Ethicam dico—sine qua nec philosophi subsistit nomen, collati decoris gratia omnes alias antecedit.” Metalogicon, 1, 24, p. 52. 56 Metalogicon, 3,1, p. 105 and 4,30, pp. 166ff.; Historia Pontiﬁcalis 12, p. 27, with von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 376ff. 57 “. . . trivium quadruvio ad generose nationis phylosophorum propaginem quasi maritali fede copulavimus. . . . In hac autem septem artium liberalium synodo ad cultum humanitatis conducta prima omnium Grammatica procedit in medium, matrona vultuque habituque severo. Pueros convocat, rationes recte scribendi, recteque loquendi prescribit, ydiomata linguarum decenter transumit, expositionem omnium auctorum sibi debitam proﬁtetur; quicquid dicit[ur] auctoritati eius committitur.” Jeauneau, ed, Lectio Philosophorum, pp. 38– 39. See further below, p. 23. 58 For the term see above, p. 6 n. 15.

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the collationes organized by Bernard, provided his students with a practical guidance to religion and ethics which the former student of Abelard had missed in his training at Paris. Complementing these spiritual exercises were the praeexercitamina or lessons in the imitation, motivated by rivalry, of the classics that Quintilian recommends at Books 10 and 12 of the Institutio oratoria. Emulating the work of the maiores, Bernard’s pupils were to become imitable in the future: faciebatque ut, qui maiores imitabatur, ﬁeret posteris imitandus.59 To his parallel between the ancient and medieval grammaticus, John adds an analogy to the classics of antiquity and the present, already evoked in his prologue:60 classic in the sense of restraint, control, proportion— modus, tenuitas, and quasi macies sermonis; slim almost to the point of stylistic anorexia, delicate and ﬁnespun, Bernard’s notion of the mean to be found in the auctores was measured by the standards of an Aristotelianism congenial to John,61 but classic, above all, as an instance of the ideal of uniﬁed learning attained by the leading poets of the Roman past and realizable by their continuators in the twelfth century. Hallowed by an aura of antiquity and protected by its distance from Parisian controversies, the example set by Bernard represented a dynamic alternative both to the modish philistinism of the “Corniﬁcians” and to the passive theory of translatio artium.62 Not so much a model with normative force transmitted, or inherited, from ancient Greece and Rome as the creation of their equal was advocated by the hero of John’s encomium. It is difﬁcult to assess the accuracy of this image of Bernard of Chartres, because only a collection of glosses on the Timaeus by his hand has survived.63 They, however, provide a clue to his approach. In his accessus, or introduction, to the incomplete Latin version of Plato’s work, Bernard enumerates the disciplines it includes.64 The Timaeus demands a knowl59

Metalogicon, p. 53. “Id quoque inter prima rudimenta docebat et inﬁgebat animis quae in economia uirtus, quae in decore rerum, quae in uerbis laudanda sint, ubi tenuitas et quasi macies sermonis, ubi copia probabilis, ubi excedens, ubi omnium modus. Historias, poemata percurrenda monebat. . . .” Metalogicon, 1,24, p. 53. 61 Cf. C. J. Nederman, “The Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean and John of Salisbury’s Concept of Liberty,” Vivarium 24 (1986), pp. 128 – 42. 62 See F. J. Worstbrock, “Translatio artium. Über die Herkunft und Entwicklung einer kulturhistorischen Theorie,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 47 (1965), pp. 1–22. Cf. G. G. Jongkees, “Translatio studii: Les Avatars d’ un thème médiéval,” in Miscellanea mediaevalia in memoriam J. Niermeyer (Groningen, 1967), pp. 41– 51. 63 Glosae super Platonem, ed. P. Dutton (Toronto, 1991). 64 Glosae super Platonem, p. 141, 56 – 63: “Supponitur uero ethicae, secundum quod de naturali iusticia uel de ordinatione rei publicae agit. Respicit logicam, cum per aliorum sententias suas ﬁrmat rationes. Ad phisicam tendit, cum de planis ﬁguris et solidis corporibus, de incorporatione animae mundi et aliarum, earumque motu perpetuo, de stellarum discursibus ratis et errantibus loquitur. Vnde seruata omnium artium fere ratione, hoc opus non rudibus, 60

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edge of all the arts but is especially suitable for advanced students, because it deals principally with quadrivial subjects. Yet its genre and function can also be understood in terms of the trivium derived from the fourth book of Diomedes’ Ars grammatica.65 Glossing the words “all the studies of humanity” in Calcidius’s prologue, Bernard states: “understand the liberal [arts], relate this to the trivium.” On the following phrase—“and with excellent ability”—he comments “in the quadrivium.”66 Such methods are needed to fathom Plato’s opus consummatum: not just the quadrivium of the specialists,67 but the full range of established and developing disciplines. Hence the appeal of Bernard’s approach to John of Salisbury. In his teaching of the Timaeus, the master of Chartres had demonstrated the necessity of blending the old artes with the new. Natural justice and the organization of the state, rhetoric, poetry, and astronomy, physics, and a form of metaphysics are all, on Bernard’s reading, present in the work.68 The ethical purpose behind his collationes animated his interpretation of the Timaeus.69 Plato, according to him, provided instruction in religion;70 and when Socrates stated that women should be held in common, he meant it as an integumentum, referring not to sexual relations but to the bond of harmony and affection that can serve the interests of the state.71 Careful to distinguish the domesticae rationes

sed in quadruuio promotis elaboratum est, ut si quae quaestiones de musica et aliis oriuntur, domesticis rationibus—scilicet musicis, arithmeticis et ceteris—sopiantur.” I do not understand Dutton’s reading sopiantur. V (⫽Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS. 2376, fol. 19r) transmits solvantur, which corresponds both to Bernard’s source—Calcidius, Commentarius 2 (“Cunctis certarum disciplinarum artiﬁcialibus remediis occurrendum est, arithmeticis astronomicis geometricis musicis, quo singulae res domesticis et consanguineis rationibus explicarentur”)—and to sense. Cf. T. Gregory, Platonismo medievale. Studi e richerche (Rome, 1958), p. 62. For advanced students see Glosae super Platonem, p. 243,446. 65 Bernard of Chartres, Glosae super Platonem, p. 145, 10 –12 (Dutton does not register the debt to Diomedes): “Sed cum sint tria genera poematum—enarratiuum, quando ex propria persona auctor loquitur; activum, quando per introductas agit; commune, quando per utrasque—hic Plato insistit activum genus.” On the poematos genera see Diomedes, Ars grammatica, ed. H. Keil, Grammatici Latini 1 (Leipzig, 1887), pp. 482ff. 66 Bernard of Chartres, Glosae super Platonem, p. 143, 37– 38. 67 G. Beaujouan, “The Transformation of the Quadrivium,” in Renaissance and Renewal, pp. 463–87, esp. 465. 68 See G. Schrimpf, “Bernhard von Chartres, die Rezeption des Timaios und die neue Sicht der Natur,” in Aufbruch—Wandel—Erneuerung, pp. 181–210, esp. 202ff.; A. Speer, Die Entdeckte Natur. Untersuchungen zu Begründungsversuchen einer “scientia naturalis” im 12. Jahrhundert (Leiden, 1995), pp. 76 –129, esp. 85 – 93; and P. Annala, “The Function of the formae nativae in the Reﬁnement of the Process of Matter: A Study of Bernard of Chartres’ Concept of Matter,” Vivarium 35 (1997), pp. 1–20. 69 Glosae super Platonem, p. 155,272–75 - 156,276. 70 Ibid., p. 221,95. 71 Ibid., p. 148,75 – 92.

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particular to each discipline and pertinent to the exegesis of this many-sided text,72 Bernard’s glosses combine a systematic approach with concision.73 Neither indiscriminate compilation nor the omnivorousness of an encyclopedist marked his procedure, but the restraint, the senses of limit and methodological propriety that John of Salisbury termed doctrinae mensura: the virtue, extolled by ancient grammarians, of “not knowing certain things.”74 By that, John intended a contrast with another theorist of education prominent during his earliest years as a student in Paris. Omnia disce, had urged Hugh of Saint-Victor in his Didascalicon of c. 1127, videbis postea nihil esse superﬂuum.75 When he added that “cramped knowledge is unsavory,” he was answering the imagined objection of a student who found that, in the works of history recommended by his master, there were “many things that seemed to be of no use.”76 Utility, relevance, and applicability were the criteria of the generation that came to maturity in the middle of the twelfth century. John’s “Corniﬁcius” was no more than an extreme version of Hugh’s pupil.77 Both of them addressed audiences that were seeking a new program of studies; both of them placed lectio at its center; but, despite these similarities, each differed from the other.78 Hugh, the leading scholar among the regular canons of Saint-Victor in the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century,79 wrote primarily for the orders that diffused his work with enthusiasm.80 Member of the community founded 72

Ibid., p. 141,63. Cf. Dutton in ibid., pp. 45ff. See too E. Jeauneau, “Gloses et commentaires de textes philosophiques (ixe-xiie siècles),” in Les Genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales. Déﬁnition, critique et exploitation, Actes du Colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve 25 –27 mai 1981 (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1981), pp. 117– 32, and id, ed., Glose Wilhelmi de Conchis super Platonem (Paris, 1965), pp. 57 and 67 with N. M. Häring, “Commentary and Hermeneutics,” in Renaissance and Renewal, pp. 173 –200, esp. 179. 74 “. . . qua parte sui propositae lectionis articulis respiciebat ad alias disciplinas proponebat in medio, ita tamen ut non in singulis universa doceret, sed pro capacitate audientium dispensaret eis in tempore doctrinae mensuram. . . . Inter virtutes grammatici merito reputatum est ab antiquis aliqua ignorare.” Metalogicon 1,24, p. 52,53 – 55 and p. 54,108 – 9. 75 Didascalicon 6,3, p. 364, 16–17. On the diffusion of the Didascalion, see R. Goy, Die Überlieferung der Werke Hugos von St. Viktor. Ein Beitrag zur Kommunikationsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 14ff. For context cf. J. Châtillon, Le Mouvement canonial au moyen âge, pp. 327– 418. 76 Didascalicon 6,3, p. 364, 7– 8. 77 For the chronology see L. M. de Rijk, “Some New Evidence on Twelfth-Century Logic: Alberic and the School of Mount Ste.-Geneviève,” Vivarium 4 (1996), pp. 1– 57, esp. 6 – 8. 78 Cf. C. Brooke in World of John of Salisbury, p. xlv. 79 Cf. K. Bosl, “Das Jahrhundert der Augustinerchorherren,” in Historiographia Medievalis. Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters. Festschrift F.-J. Schmale, ed. D. Berg (Darmstadt, 1988), pp. 1–17. 80 See Goy, Überlieferung, pp. 509ff., 559ff. 73

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by William of Champeaux in the face of opposition by Abelard’s patron, Stephen of Garland,81 Hugh took a low view of the “boastful trifters,” contemptuous of their masters, who believed themselves capable of penetrating the mysteries of scripture. Without mentioning Abelard’s name, Hugh’s reference to him was plain—both in the Didascalicon and in letters voicing concern to Bernard of Clairvaux about the views of an unidentiﬁed theologian. That latent hostility, which mounted during the second and third decades of the twelfth century to reach an open rupture in 1139 – 41, suggests why, when disagreement with Abelard is voiced in the Metalogicon, he is described as Peripateticus Palatinus.82 Placed at a stage of his itinerant career (c. 1121–26) before he taught John at Paris, this suspect scholar blown by the winds into which his epigonoi were strewing the leaves of words did not offer a respectable model of concordantia artium. Marking his distance from Abelard, John was equally remote from his critic, Hugh of Saint-Victor. The Didascalicon, from John of Salisbury’s perspective, was dubious, because it offered comfort to the Corniﬁciani. Imagine how they, spurners of the verbal arts that he regarded as “the foster parent of all philosophy,” read Hugh’s dismissals of the appendentia artium—inferior subjects with a nonphilosophical content—such as poetry, tragedy, comedy, and every other form of literature.83 Had Hugh not poured scorn on those, like Bernard of Chartres, who sought to combine “scattered and muddled snippets from the artes”? The idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk was a joke in the opinion of this unclassical scholar, who assigned grammatica—for John, the “origin of all liberal disciplines”—a role that was instrumental, technical, and subordinate. A counterprogram had therefore to be found to rival that of the Didascalicon, a substitute for the inﬂuential but irritating rival of Bernard. Hugh of Saint-Victor had cited him condescendingly as quidam sapiens, commenting, on “the old man’s” verses about the moral qualities and humble circumstances needed for a life of learning, that they were visibly inspired by an ancient proverb that he then proceeded to explain differently.84 Anonymous, derivative, and a triﬂe commonplace, the Bernard of Chartres 81 See J. Ehlers, Hugo von St. Viktor. Studien zum Geschichtsdenken und zur Geschichtsschreibung des 12. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurter Historische Studien 7 (Wiesbaden, 1973), pp. 15ff., and Châtillon, Mouvement canonial, pp. 367ff. 82 E.g., Metalogicon 3, 1, p. 103,5 – 9 and 3, 6, p. 122,23 –29. 83 Didascalicon 3,4, p. 230,26 - p. 231,1–7: “Aliquando tamen quaedam ab artibus discerpta sparsim et confuse attingunt vel, si simplex narratio est, viam ad philosophiam praeparant. Huiusmodi sunt omnia poetarum carmina, ut sunt tragoediae, comoediae, satirae, heroica quoque et lyrica, et iambica et didascalia quaedam, fabulae quoque et historiae, illorum etiam scripta, quos nunc ‘philosophos’ appellare solemus.” 84 Didascalicon 3,12, p. 250,1–11.

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slighted in the Didascalicon is elevated, by the Metalogicon, into the exponent of an ideal fundamentally different from Hugh’s. Lectio, in the method developed at Saint-Victor, was represented as a means of recovering the unity of knowledge lost at the fall.85 Unity between the two systems of secular and sacred learning which Hugh outlines is not achieved in his book.86 Separated from one another, the ill-matched partners of the Didascalicon lead to the goal of holy writ that Hugh, in a term to which John of Salisbury lent classical ﬂavor, elsewhere called consummatum.87 “Finished,” “complete,” or “rounded,” the ﬁnal product the Didascalicon aimed to deliver was theological. What it lacked was not a sense of methodological propriety,88 but a sense of discrimination—including subjects such as mechanica scarcely pertinent to Hugh’s objective.89 All such elements of peripheral or superﬂuous erudition are pared away by John of Salisbury, concentrating instead on the indispensable subject of grammatica, from which he derived the hermeneutic skills that could be applied to the exegesis of any text. And interpretation, in this reordering of Hugh’s system, was not to be an end to itself. Combining with one another to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, “scattered and muddled snippets from the artes” were to be used to demonstrate that the study of language and literature, shunned by Hugh as inferior and marginal, stood at the center of the higher disciplines. For the encyclopedism of a regular canon was substituted the concordantia artium of a secular cleric, as Bernard of Chartres, Hugh’s buffer from the provinces, became, in the Metalogicon, the spokesman and symbol of an ideal of uniﬁed culture applicable to life outside the cloister. Outside the cloister of Saint-Victor, beyond the schools of Paris, at the center of the largest diocese under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan of Sens,90 the future bishop of Chartres located (or imagined) a seat of learn85 Cf. J. P. Kleinz, The Theory of Knowledge of Hugh of St. Victor, The Catholic University of America Studies 87 ((Washington 1944), pp. 16ff.; R. Baron, Science et sagesse chez Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris, 1957), pp. 59ff.; and P. Sicard, Hugues de Saint-Victor et son école (Brepols, 1991), pp. 19ff. 86 See P. Offergeld in Didascalicon, pp. 68ff. 87 Cf. Epitome Dindimii in philosophiam, ed. R. Baron, Hugonis de Sancti Victore opera propaedeutica (Notre Dame, 1966), p. 205,447– 48. 88 Didascalicon 2,17, p. 182,18ff.: “Cum vero omnes artes ad unum philosophiae tendunt terminum, non una tamen via omnes currunt, sed singulae suas proprias quasdam considerationes habent;” 3,4, p. 234,18 –21: “Mihi errare videntur, qui non attendentes talem in artibus cohaerentiam, quasdam sibi ex ipsis eligunt, et, ceteris intactis, in his se posse ﬁeri perfectos putant.” 89 See P. Vallin, “‘Mechanica’ et ‘Philosophia’ chez Hugues de Saint-Victor,” Revue d’ histoire de la spiritualité 49 (1973), pp. 257– 88. 90 Cf. Châtillon, Mouvement canonial, pp. 361ff.

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ing to which his preferment would seem natural.91 Setting Bernard apart from the fools’ parade of distinguished but misguided masters, followed by their erring or treacherous pupils in the ﬁrst two books of the Metalogicon, John of Salisbury reserved gentle irony for the sage of Chartres’ efforts to achieve a concord of Plato and Aristotle.92 A fresh attempt had now to be made and a place found for himself in this discontinuous tradition. No easy task, even for Bernard’s indirect heir, for material necessity had compelled John to relinquish the academic profession and “philosophize by stealth.” Furtim philosophari: the expression occurs in the prologue to the third book, where John compares his lack of leisure to touch “even in passing” (nec in transitu) the tools of the philosophical trade with his ten crossings of the Alps (Alpium iuga transcendi decies)93 —parallel transitions that suggested his “unofﬁcial” status as a thinker. Going on to demonstrate a command of the Aristotelian tradition with which he claims to have lost contact, he praises the modern philosophers—Gilbert, Abelard, and Adam—whom he had previously criticized. Contradiction is inherent in John’s position and latent in the terms that proclaim his distraction as a busy bureaucrat—the “occupations not only differing among themselves but also conﬂicting with one another” cited by Abelard’s sometime student recalling the ﬁrst sentence of Sic et non.94 With an afﬁrmation of ignorance, John advertises his well-informed scepticism. Academicus sum, he declares, a humble encomiast of modern auctores.95 Are these the moderation and modesty that he repeatedly asserts, and of which others have made much?96 Not a bit of it. No sooner has John deferred to Abelard’s authority, than he attacks the philosopher’s “puerile opinion on genres and species—with peace to his followers.”97 Against the excesses of dialectic, John of Salisbury conducts a dialectical crusade, its paradoxes resolved in a plea for simplicity. The hermeneutic of veriﬁcation that he learned from Robert of Melun informs his principle that “the text is to be beaten softly” (littera enim suaviter excutienda est). Gentle scrutiny is recommended, “not savage torture until the letter yields what it did not possess.”98 Forced interpretation condemned, plainness is the friend of truth. The face, the surface, the literal level of writing should be revered as sacrosanct. These religious metaphors draw an antithesis be91

See below, p. 176. Metalogicon 2, 17, p. 83, 80 – 84. 93 Ibid., 3, prol.p. 101,10 –15. 94 Ibid., 3 prol.p. 101,9. Cf. von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 26ff. 95 Metalogicon, 3, prol. p. 102,68 – 69. 96 Von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, p. 84 and G. C. Garfagnini, “L’attività storico-ﬁlosoﬁca nel secolo xii: Giovanni di Salisbury,” SM 3a ser. 20 (1989), pp. 839 – 53. 97 Metalogicon 3,1, p. 103,5 – 9. 98 “. . . non more captivorum acerbe torquenda, donec restituat quod non accepit.” Metalogicon 3, 1, p. 104,41– 43. 92

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tween the indulgence of loving orthodoxy and the harshness of cruel heresy. Reconciliation was the object, and it could only be achieved by an interdisciplinary approach, for “the auctores interpret one another, and individual writings reciprocally shed light on others.”99 So it is that Bernard of Chartres’ program expands to acquire the scope of an ecumenical enterprise of reading. If reading, moral paradigm of scholarly activity, was threatened by arbitrary interpretations, the search for a means of hermeneutic control in the Metalogicon united its author with some of his contemporaries whom he criticized so snidely. John of Salisbury understood dialectic as a method of eliminating the polyvalence of language. Nothing different was attempted by the logici, who would have shared his premise that “equivocation induces many errors, if it remains hidden.”100 Their attempts to develop a coherent semantic theory focused on the limitation of multiple meanings.101 Nevertheless while examining, in the third and fourth books of the Metalogicon, propositions from the “old” and the “new” logic,102 John goes out of his way to imprecate against the misuse of this subject by members of his own generation. Distorting the texts that they treated, the dialecticians misunderstood their subject when they aimed to restrict it. Its aim, as John conceived it, was “to open up the force of words”; and here too Bernard of Chartres’ example was relevant. Eschewing arcane or artiﬁcial examples, he had demonstrated how grammar could be combined with dialectic to constitute an ontology of being.103 Adam of Balsam (mistakenly identiﬁed as one of John’s teachers104) would have preferred simplicity and facility but was compelled to do the opposite from fear of losing his audience. In what amounts to special pleading for a friend to whom he professes attachment, John attributes the blame to Adam’s epigonoi.105 99 “. . . se invicem interpretantur auctores, et singulae scripturae vicissim sunt indices aliarum.” Ibid., p. 105,82– 84. 100 “. . . aequivocatio multos inducit errores, si lateat.” Ibid., p. 106,7– 8. 101 Cf. J. de Rijk, Logica modernorum. A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic 1 (Assen, 1962), I. Rosier, “Evolution des notions d’ equivocatio et univocatio au xiie siècle,” in L’Ambiguité. Cinq études historiques, ed. Rosier (Lille, 1988), pp. 103 – 66, and A. de Libera, “La Logique du moyen âge comme logique naturelle (Sprachlogik). Vues médiévales sur l’ambiguité,” in Sprachphilosophie in Antike und Mittelalter, Bochum Kolloquium 2–4 Juni 1982, ed. B. Mojsisch (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 403 – 38. 102 See K. Jakobi, “Logic (ii): The Later Twelfth Century,” in Cambridge History, pp. 227–54, esp. 227ff. 103 Metalogicon 3,4, p. 115,10–14, with Jolivet, “Rapports entre la grammaire et l’ontologie au moyen âge,” in his Aspects de la pensée médievale, Abélard. Doctrines du langage (Paris, 1987), pp. 204ff. 104 Southern, Scholastic Humanism, p. 226. 105 “. . . noster ille Anglus Peripateticus Adam, cuius vestigia sequuntur multi, sed pauci praepediente invidia proﬁtentur, dicebatque se aut nullum aut auditores paucissimos habiturum, si ea simplicitate sermonum et facilitate sententiarum dialecticam traderent, qua ipsam

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These obscurantists suffered from an anxiety of inﬂuence. Capable of teaching, more concisely and lucidly than Aristotle, all that is expounded in the Categories and Periermenias, they were intimidated by the reverentia verborum that the ancients commanded.106 With mock solemnity John imitated the pose assumed by the mystiﬁers and complicators of his own generation when he added: “Reverence is to be shown to the words of the auctores both in careful and assiduous use and because they convey a certain majesty, derived from the great names of antiquity.”107 That sentence, however, continues: “And also because ignorance of them is more costly, since they are most powerful in pressing or refuting [an argument]. For they snatch up the ignorant like a whirlwind, terrifying and tossing them about, casting them down. Indeed the words of the philosophers, previously unheard, are like the rumbling of thunder.”108 The style is that of Apocalypse (4,5; 8,5; 14,2 etc.), its magniloquence aping the epigonoi, awestruck by the voice of authority. John’s argument is not in favor of uncritical veneration of antiquity, but for the use (or manipulation) of its resources in a modern context. When Abelard, commended in the Metalogicon for the truth of his insight, stated that, although the moderni might write works that, in substance and style, were in no way inferior to those of the antiqui, they would never acquire the same status (favor), he was referring to the self-perception of his contemporaries.109 Overcompensating for their ignorance, as John describes them at Metalogicon 2, 7, they “spouted forth triﬂes”—deigning only to acknowledge Aristotle, considering themselves sages of the Academy during their tender youth, and “shouting themselves hoarse on the highways and by-ways.”110 doceri expediret. Habui enim hominem familiarem assiduitate colloquii . . . sed nec una die discipulus eius fui.” Metalogicon 3,3, p. 114,192– 99. 106 Metalogicon 3,4,p. 115,10 –14. 107 “. . . Reverentia exhibenda est verbis auctorum, cum cultu et assiduitate utendi, tum quia quandam a magnis nominibus antiquitatis preferunt maiestatem.” Ibid., 3, 4, p. 116,27– 29. 108 “. . . tum quia dispendiosius ignorantur, cum ad urgendum aut resistendum potentissima sint. Siquidem ignaros in modum turbinis rapiunt et metu perculsos exagitant aut prosternunt. Inaudita enim philosophorum verba tonitrua sunt.” Ibid., p. 116,29 – 33. 109 Ibid., p. 116, 33– 34 with H. Hartmann, ““Modernus” und “antiquus”: Zur Verbreitung und Bedeutung dieser Bezeichnungen in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert,” and A. Gössmann, “‘Antiqui’ und ‘moderni’ im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Antiqui und Moderni. Traditionsbewußtsein und Fortschrittsbewußtsein im späten Mittelalter, ed. A. Zimmermann, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 9 (Berlin, 1974), 21– 39, esp. 32– 33; 40 – 57, esp. 55–56. 110 “Non tamen, ut in logicam invehar, haec propono (scientia enim jucunda est et fructuosa) sed ut illis eam liqueat non adesse, qui clamant in compitis et in triviis docent, et in ea, quam solam proﬁtentur, non decennium aut vicennium, sed totam consumpserunt aetatem. Nam et cum senectus ingruit, corpus enervat, sensuum retundit acumina et praecedentes comprimit voluptates, sola haec in ore volvitur, versatur in manibus, et aliis omnibus studiis praeripit locum. Fiunt itaque in puerilibus Academici senes, omnem dictorum aut scriptorum

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These were the terms in which Abelard had been condemned by the French episcopate and criticized by Hugh of Saint-Victor.111 Transferring to the followers of the Peripateticus Palatinus faults that others had attributed to their teacher, John made of Abelard a doubter, sceptical less about the achievements of the moderni than about their capacity to be recognized. That interpretation of Abelard was perceptive. Recognition, or its absence, had indeed been one of his main concerns.112 Cut down to size not by the hostility of his enemies but by the obtuseness of his adherents, the disenchanted giant of modern philosophy is then juxtaposed with another, more reassuring hero of culture. Bernard of Chartres, John’s alternative to Abelard, offered an image of the moderni as dwarves on the shoulders of giants which expressed, with a modesty notoriously lacking in the Peripateticus Palatinus, a dynamic concept of tradition that allowed for progress.113 “Who is satisﬁed with what even Aristotle teaches in the Perihermeneias? Who does not add his own ﬁndings from elsewhere? . . . Everyone dresses his interpretations of the ancients up in an almost everyday clothing that is imperceptibly gayer when brightened by the distinction of antiquity’s gravity.”114 Not with the solemnity of a worshiper clad in Sunday best, but with the light touch of quotidian familiarity and affectionate respect, were the works of antiquity to be handled. The urge to surpass them, like a dissatisﬁed craving for auctoritas, produced the morose scepticism of an Abelard or the bumptious insecurity of his followers. Bernard’s approach was less strident and more conﬁdent; and it is in his spirit, described at Metalogicon 1,24, that John afﬁrms the ability of modern writers to become auctores. The excutiunt sillabam, immo et litteram; dubitantes ad omnia, quaerentes semper, sed nunquam ad scientiam pervenientes; et tandem convertuntur ad vaniloquium, nescientes quid loquantur aut de quibus asserant. Errores condunt novos, et antiquorum aut nesciunt aut dedignantur sententias imitari. Compilant omnium opiniones, et ea quae etiam a vilissimis dicta vel scripta sunt, ab inopia iudicii scribunt et referunt; proponunt enim omnia, quia nesciunt praeferre meliora. Tanta est opinionum oppositionumque congeries, ut vix suo nota esse possit auctori . . . Aristoteles quem solum nugidici ventilatores isti dignantur agnoscere.” p. 66, 1–26. 111 For the bishops’ letter see above, p. 102. Cf. Hugh, Didascalicon 3, 13, p. 256,8 –11: “Hinc etiam ebullit, quod nugigeruli nunc quidam, nescio unde gloriantes priores patres simplicitatis arguunt et secum natam secum morituram credunt sapientiam.” 112 See above, pp. 86ff. 113 Metalogicon 3, 4,46– 50 with T. Leuker, ““Zwerge auf den Schultern von Riesen.” Zur Entstehung des berühmten Vergleichs,” MlJb 32 (1997), pp. 71–76; Jeauneau, Lectio Philosophorum, pp. 51–74; and W. Haug, Strukturen als Schlüssel zur Welt. Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters (Tübingen, 1990), pp. 86 –109. 114 “Quis enim contentus est his, quae vel Aristotoles in Periermeniis docet? Quis aliunde conquisita non adicit? Omnes . . . vestiunt enim sensus auctorum quasi cultu cotidiano, qui quodam modo festivior est, cum antiquitatis gravitate clarius insignitur.” Metalogicon 3, 4, p. 116,53-p. 117,54 – 58.

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classics, for him, were not to be placed on a pedestal but held in the memory. Recollected and refashioned, they could unleash stores of hidden vitality. It was essential, however, to respect context: “Many are the opinions that are tasteless or insipid to the hearer, if they are plucked from their foundations.”115 Ahistorical exegesis being as alien to John’s taste as academic purism, the verbal and therefore ethical phenomena of equivocation, ambiguity, and polysemy are viewed by him with mistrust. In such dubious cases, John advocates the “shaking” or “scrutinizing” of an expression to extract its force (necesse est vim sermonis excutere),116 without which there can be no “faithful understanding of words.”117 Fidelity, not arbitrariness; comprehension of the literal meaning of the text rather than imposition of the interpreter’s own: these criteria, combined with the injunction to remove “the fraudulence of equivocation, together with all uncertainties” and to ﬂee obscurity, serve the interests of “the most open interpretation.”118 Hermeneutic freedom with responsibility enables John, with the aid of the nova logica, both to deny that he is writing a textbook and to surpass the logicians of his age. Discussing in detail the Aristotelian Topics rejected as useless by the pupils of Robert of Melun,119 he contrives to mark his distance from the imitators of a master to whom his own theory of interpretation owed a large and unacknowledged debt. Like Abelard’s drudges and Adam’s parrots, they neglected the “new” logic and overestimated the potential of dialectic. Necessitas not lying within its scope, nor being measurable by its standards, only the relative perceptions of probability could be reached by dialectical methods.120 Having marked, with the scepticism of the academicus, his alienation from the Academy, John set himself in an intellectual avant-garde—the form of his Metalogicon recalling the logical tracts of the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century, while its unsystematic presentation set it apart from the products of the schoolroom. An alternative to their professional scholarship, a substitute for the religious priorities of the Didascalicon, it offered a more worldly, more applicable, more comprehensive culture yet stopped short of theological debate.121 From that limit, beyond which Abelard had trespassed, his cautious pupil steered clear. But 115

Ibid., p. 117,58 – 64. Ibid. 3,5, p. 121,92. 117 Ibid., 3,5, p. 121;91– 93. 118 “Recte enim assignata est, cum fuerit aequalis deﬁnito et planissima utitur interpretatione. Amovenda ergo est non modo aequivocationis impostura, sed omnium quae incerta sunt fugienda obscuritas . . .” Ibid. 3,8, p. 125,21ff. 119 Metalogicon 4,24, p. 162 with N. Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages. The Commentaries on Aristotle’s and Boethius’ Topics (Munich, 1984), p. 87. 120 Cf. dal Pra, Giovanni di Salisbury, pp. 64ff. 121 Ibid., pp. 94ff. 116

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if John averted his gaze from the eternal verities, he did not lose sight of the terrestrial truths. Toulouse, in the autumn of 1159, was under siege. War threatened between England and France. Pope Adrian IV had died; Archbishop Theobald lay gravely ill. John’s thoughts turned, at the end of the Metalogicon, to present dangers and past success. Had he not been a familiar of the late pontiff, who had loved him more than his mother and brother?122 At John’s request, Adrian IV had granted Henry II the kingdom of Ireland. No word of the claims of Canterbury to jurisdiction over the Irish episcopate in the Norse townships, so usefully furthered by the mission.123 Instead attention is drawn to John’s services to the king, whose powerful minister was Becket. Only he could intercede with Henry II. The urgency of the language recalls John’s entreaties to the chancellor during his troubles of 1156–57.124 “Not an evil is to be found in our country of which I am not the author,” he had then asserted,125 adding testimonials from the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury. The one patron was now deceased; the other might soon follow him to the grave. Theobald had burdened John with responsibilities for the entire church in England.126 Self-dramatizing in style, the last chapter of the Metalogicon emphasizes its author’s proximity to power. What he sought was the exercise of inﬂuence in his favor. The request was lodged with Thomas Becket, a more improbable dedicatee of a learned work than is usually admitted. Unlike his rival for the see of Canterbury, Gilbert Foliot, Becket had been neither a theologian nor a master in the schools.127 His stay in Paris as a student was short, his knowledge of the curriculum was superﬁcial.128 Compared to such learned clerics as John of Salisbury in the entourage of Archbishop Theobald, Becket can be regarded as an “academic failure.”129 At the council of Tours in 1163 (according to the hostile Stephen of Rouen),130 he was constrained to silence, because he did not know enough Latin to speak; and even his partisan Herbert of Bosham regarded the hexa122

Metalogicon 4,42, p. 183,7–20. See W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 195ff. 124 See G. Constable, “The Alleged Disgrace of John of Salisbury in 1159,” English Historical Review 69 (1954), pp. 67–76. 125 Ep. 28, in The Letters of John of Salisbury I, The Early Letters (1153–1161), ed. W. J. Millor, S. J. and H. E. Buttler, rev. C. Brooke (London, 1955), p. 46. 126 Metalogicon 4, 42, p. 184,39 – 46. 127 B. Smalley, The Becket Conﬂict and the Schools. A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Oxford, 1973), p. 178. For context see too A. Duggan, “John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket,” in World of John of Salisbury, pp. 427– 38. 128 F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), p. 21. 129 Ibid., p. 32. 130 Smalley, Becket Conﬂict, p. 112. 123

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meter that occurred to the sleeping Becket during exile at Sens as miraculous, because he did not know how to compose Latin verse when awake.131 Verse composition was traditionally the task of the pupils of the grammaticus, as Metalogicon I,24 relates. At that modest academic level, the chancellor of England to whom John of Salisbury inscribed his book had barely risen to mediocrity. Mediocrity was not Becket’s style. Favorite of King Henry II, he was celebrated in 1159 for his magniﬁcence. Patronage was of course one of John’s motives in his double dedication of the Metalogicon and Policraticus to a leading candidate for the see of Canterbury, but the relationship he sought had reciprocal advantages, indicated by his letters. John never wrote to Thomas Becket in the learned manner, on erudite issues, which he employed in correspondence with his friend Peter of Celle;132 and when, in January 1165, he considered the question of how the archbishop might usefully pass his time in exile, he advised him to ponder the psalms and moral works of Saint Gregory rather than scholastic philosophy—better ethical discussion with a spiritual adviser than hairsplitting over secular literature.133 In the summer of the same year, John reported to Bishop Bartholomew of Exeter that absence from England had undoubtedly done Becket good, quod ad litteraturam et mores.134 Denouncing the bishop of Hereford in July 1166, John wrote that Robert of Melun “is believed to be a man of letters by those who know nothing of literature.”135 While Robert was found wanting by the cultural standards applied to measure a twelfth-century prelate,136 the personal tutor of the archbishop of Canterbury boasted that his pupil was making progress. Such references marked a distinct shift of tone—from the formality of John’s correspondence with Becket six years earlier137 to the complicity of an alliance cemented by shared values. “This is not the tone or style in which to write to a cardinal-priest and legate of the holy see,” his adviser admonished the archbishop in the autumn of 1167; “I shall say nothing of William of 131

Barlow, Becket, p. 22. Cf. Epp. 33 and 111 in The Letters of John of Salisbury 1, pp. 55– 58 and 180 – 82. 133 “Mallem vos Psalmos ruminare et beati Gregorii morales libros revolvere quam scolastico more philosophari. Expedit conferre de moribus cum aliquo spirituali . . . quam inspicere et discutere litigiosos articulos saecularium litterarum.” Ep. 144 in The Letters of John of Salisbury 2, The Later Letters (1163 –1180), ed. W. J. Millor, S. J. and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1979), p. 34. 134 Ep. 150, ibid., p. 48. 135 Ep. 175, ibid., p. 156. 136 See above, p. 173. 137 Ep. 128 in Letters 1, pp. 221–23. For the concept in a courtly-diplomatic context, see J. Suchomski, “Delectatio” und “utilitas”: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur (Berne, 1975), p. 46. 132

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Pavia’s loedorias et scomata, that is, his open and implied stings.” The allusion to Macrobius (Saturnalia 7.3.2) was familiar to the Becket who had read Policraticus 7, 25:138 to the archbishop altered from a magniﬁcus nugator in curia139 into a defender of his church from persecution. One stage in that metamorphosis took place at the conference between Gisors and Trie in November 1167, where Becket, according to his rolemodeler, declined to be provoked by the accusations of King Henry II related to him by the papal legates. “The archbishop of Canterbury, in all humbleness and calmness of spirit, with a clear countenance, sparkling eyes and rosy face, spoke out with eloquent skill in the Latin tongue. . . .”140 Four years earlier Becket had been incapable of such eloquence. The report was composed by John of Salisbury, who was present at the scene; and if the Latin speech he attributes to his patron was ghostwritten by himself, its authorship was beside the point. The point was that the conference of Gisors-Trie and the synod of Tours were no longer comparable because, by now, Becket was listening to the advice John had given him in the summer of 1166: “Heed the counsel of a few clerics, prudent and wise, if you have any such. . . .”141 The archbishop had one such cleric, both prudent and wise, who effected his transformation from a ﬂamboyant courtier into a master of measured rhetoric. The ethical interpretation of literature advocated in the Metalogicon and illustrated in the Policraticus is put into practice in John of Salisbury’s reformation of his patron’s image. And as Becket changes from a semisecular potentate to a champion of the ecclesiastical cause, so John’s self-portrayal alters: from client to teacher, from ally to admonisher, ending in the hagiographer of a ﬁgure whose sanctity, during his last years, had been projected in the public relations of Latin letters. Latin literature had its uses. Who was to gainsay John of Salisbury, trusted agent of the martyred Becket, devout servant of the church? As he stressed at the end of the Metalogicon, he was no provincial cleric but a friend of Pope Adrian IV. Both during his student days and later, in the course of his years at the curia and his diplomatic missions to the French court, he had always been a great knower of people; and if Henry II, after Becket’s murder and his own reconciliation with the pope in 1172, ﬁlled vacant bishoprics with his own supporters,142 ignoring John’s claim to preferment, England did not represent the limits of this well-connected 138

Ep. 227 in Letters 2, p. 397. Ep. 187, ibid., p. 244. 140 Ep. 231, ibid., p. 418. 141 Ep. 179, ibid., p. 190. 142 See Brooke, “John of Salisbury and His World,” in The World of John of Salisbury, p. 19 and n. 82. 139

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courtier’s resources. William of the White Hands, archbishop of Reims, proposed to his brother-in-law, King Louis VII of France, that he yield the vacant bishopric of Chartres to John. At last otium cum dignitate? Certainly, but also a reward for services rendered. Styling Becket a victim of Henry II’s tyranny, this thorn in the ﬂesh of the English king became a meritorious agent of his French rival; and William of the White Hands was a muniﬁcent patron of literature.143 John of Salisbury was deserving—on one side of the Channel, when the other proved recalcitrant. Saint Thomas, as he portrayed him, had been both a thinker and a statesman—a precursor of Stephen Langton, the theorist of the limits of obedience to royal power and the archbishop of Canterbury who “had a hand in Magna Carta.”144 Strife in England was welcome in France. Small wonder then that, for less disinterested motives than sometimes surmised, William translated John from Canterbury in 1176 and elevated him to Chartres. At the Chartres where he ended his career, in a locus amoenus removed from the turbulent scene of his own studies, at a time safely assigned to a past that predated the conﬂicts through which he had lived in Paris, John of Salisbury located the “most abundant source of literature in the Gaul of modern times.” Fons et origo of a conﬁdent “modernism,” prime exponent of the litteratura that had become a criterion for promotion to episcopal ofﬁce, Bernard had educated Gilbert of Poitiers, John’s other hero, whom he defended, with unmatched subtlety, in the Historia Pontiﬁcalis.145 Nothing could be more misleading than the opinion that, in writing about Bernard of Chartres, he was expounding an old-fashioned model of education by the auctores. John’s ideal was actual, combative, and comprehensive. Directed to the formation of an erudite but active prelate and away from the aberrant professionalism of the schools, where applied learning was not to be had, John provided his patron with a guide to the new and the old learning and an introduction to hermeneutics in the Metalogicon, while demonstrating in the Policraticus how these theories might be put into practice. The aims and character of John of Salisbury’s didactic enterprise are deﬁned in the prologue to Book I of the Policraticus, where the link between him and Thomas Becket drawn at the end of the Metalogicon is strengthened and deepened into a parallel. Twelve years spent in courtiers’ frivolities had meant mere servitude. Weary and regretful, John longed for higher 143

See above, chapter I, n.110. Smalley, Becket Conﬂict, p. 13 with F. M. Powicke, Stephen Langton (Oxford, 1928). 145 See above, p. 124. For Gilbert’s debt to Bernard of Chartres, see the letter attributed to him in Glosae super Platonem, ed. Dutton, p. 245 (E): “denique quicquid sum tibi post Deum attribuo, tibi ascribo.” 144

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things: for a transfer to the “throng of philosophers” among whom he had been trained.146 Then comes the coup de théâtre: Becket was like him. “You, too, I feel, are placed in the same situation”147 —more splendid, of course, showered with applause, compared with which John’s uncouth encomium is but a pebble in the heap. Amid the luxury and delights of the court, Becket had not allowed himself to be corrupted. If that odious milieu was beyond redemption, his patron’s virtue remained intact. That is what John had asserted earlier, in the Entheticus maior, depicting Becket as a reluctant courtier and a would-be reformer.148 Repeated and expanded in the prologue to Book I of the Policraticus, at a time when the chancellor, noted for the splendor of his missions to France,149 had taken the Toulouse command refused by all the earls in Henry’s army and captured three fortiﬁed towns, the praise of Becket’s unworldliness had a hollow ring. “The provinces might erect a triumphal arch to his victories,” declared John of Salisbury, “but the selfeffacing subduer of Aquitaine cared nothing for worldly glory.” On the literal level promoted by the Metalogicon, these words were, in 1159, stuff and nonsense. Not the chancellor as he was, but the potential archbishop whom his adviser and would-be conﬁdant wished him to become, is reﬂected in the magnifying mirror of John’s prologue.150 Becket had advised him on how to climb the slippery ladder of curial success, but the lover of letters had not advanced one rung.151 Given his own account of his intimacy with Adrian IV and his attempts to win back the favor of Henry II, it may be naive to take John at his ambiguous word and conclude that “all he wanted was modest comfort and an interesting job.”152 What he wanted was a successor to Theobald of Canterbury cast in his own mold. And John’s wish, in more than one respect, was granted. When, at the beginning of his primacy, the newly appointed archbishop gathered men of learning about him,153 he was following the advice given him by John three years earlier. Ill-prepared for the responsibilities that devolved on him in 1162, Becket 146 “. . . me . . . quasi sacratioris philosophiae lactatum uberibus ablactatumque decuerat ad philosophantium transisse coetum.” Policraticus, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118 (Turnhout, 1993), p. 23,58 – 59. 147 “Et te quidem sentio in eadem conditione versari.” Ibid., 60 – 61. 148 On the theme cf. G. Cantarella, Principi e corti. L`Europa del xii secolo (Turin, 1997), pp. 247ff. 149 Barlow, Becket, p. 58. 150 “Sed vereor, frustra ne cancellarius instet, / ut mutet mores aula superba suos.” Entheticus maior, p. 201, vv. 1485ff. 151 “Noli ergo mirari quare aliquem gradum scalae, quae nunc sola novit ascensum, prout quandoque monuisti, non ascendo.” Policraticus, prol. 1, p. 22,47– 49. 152 Smalley, Becket Conﬂict, p. 89. 153 Ibid., p. 121.

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had been told that he needed guidance. The moralist wrote, under the cover of ﬁction, in the public interest of preparing a statesman.154 In order to become a policraticus,155 the chancellor was to mend his ways. A keen hawksman and huntsman in his youth,156 Becket was drawn to this pastime of the nobility, discussed at Policraticus I,4, where the chase is the starting-point and the pretext for a disquisition de moribus and for thoughts on types of tradition. Two of them are distinguished: that of the Thebans, who approved of hunting and transmitted their teaching to the degenerate Carthaginians, and that of the Athenians and Spartans who, “wrapping the mysteries of nature and customs in varied ﬁctitious coverings,”157 provided instruction and pleasure. Reminded that both the good and the bad are of ethical interest, Becket was introduced to the polyvalent realm of literature. At the threshold stands Ganymede. What a lesson is taught by the fate of that catamite! Levity can be borne aloft by a bird, and voluptuousness does not blush at being prostituted to lust! The fate of Actaeon, torn apart by Diana’s hounds, suggests that the Thebans chose her as goddess to preside over the hunt because they wanted to preserve the reputation of their other deities from “decadence and malice.” Adonis was ripped apart by a bear, leaving Venus distraught; and think of what Dido and Aeneas got up to in the woods! No famous man was much attached to this sport: if Meleager slew the Calydonian boar, it was to save his homeland. Consider the trouble and expense involved in hare-hunting! Anyone would believe that a Roman triumph was warranted by bagging game, for all the fuss that is made of it. The chase has its own vocabulary, fantastic and obscure. If you don’t know it, you will be accused of ignorance, for these are the liberal arts of today’s aristocrats. No aristocrat and no expert in the less faddish artes liberales, Becket was told of the dangers that accrue to lifemanship and of his need for guidance in the slippery sphere of exempla. By their variety, their multiplicity, and their apparent randomness, they are intended both to arouse his interest and tax his concentration, for John’s aim was to replace Becket’s favorite sport with another. That hunting with birds is even worse than hunting with beasts is demonstrated by the fact that the weaker sex is better at hawking. Did not Ulysses, although recognized by a hound on his return to Ithaca, forbid Telemachus to indulge in the chase? A waste of time and 154 “Auctorum nostrisque ﬁgmentis indulgeat, si publicae serviunt utilitati.” Policraticus, p. 26,157–58. 155 On the interpretation of this term, see von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 556 – 82. 156 Barlow, Becket, p. 20. 157 “Naturae morumque mysteria variis ﬁgmentorum involucris obtexentes, sic tamen ut ex cautela malorum utilitatem inducerent aut ex lepore poematis voluptatem.” Policraticus 1,4, p. 29, 10–12.

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money, it was ridiculed by Virgil. After futile effort and prodigal expense, it leads to Centaurs’ banquets, from which no one returns without a scar. Conscious that he has pressed his riotous reading of pagan literature to the limits of credibility, John now turns to the Bible. “If you don’t believe the stories with which the poets lend color to their fables,” attend to God’s word. Nembroth the hunter is a ﬁgure of blasphemous pride. Esau began by being keen on the chase and ended by thirsting for his brother’s blood. Worse still, this fratricidal fan of hunting possessed hairy hands. Examples are legion that no holy man was ever a hunter—Alexander and Caesar, yes, but not Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Seneca, or Soranus. Augustine and Jerome, Lawrence and Vincent were united in their condemnations. Yet there is another side to the story. It will not do to exaggerate. Having taken his case to its extreme, John desires to qualify. Hunting, he now concedes, can be useful and honorable. All depends on time and place, manner, motive, and individual. A hunter should not aspire to royal or pontiﬁcal ofﬁce, for that type of person it is excluded. But good cause may lend merit to an otherwise reprehensible action. Did not Esau go hunting to alleviate his father’s hunger and obtain his blessing? And as the would-be fratricide, once condemned, is rehabilitated, so allowance is made for the occasion and scene of an action, for the manner in which and the agent by whom it is undertaken. What John had censured, he now proceeds to treat with indulgence. That dialectical volte-face is effected by techniques employed in the formal analysis of literature. Place, time, manner, person, and cause: these are the methodical criteria of the circumstantiae, ignored by Abelard but emphasized by Hugh of Saint-Victor, advocating the primacy of scripture’s historical sense.158 Echoing the Didascalicon at the beginning of his discussion of polyvalency at Policraticus 7,10, John attributes a different meaning to the sensus historicus.159 Literature, both sacred and profane, provides a quarry of exempla that can be applied to life; but even if a case can be argued successively on both sides, there are limits to such mental gymnastics. Excepted from John’s catalogue of mitigating circumstances are “those in holy orders and holders of high legal ofﬁces”—a patent reference to Chancellor Becket. What in others is a venial fault amounts, in him, to a sin. Hunting priests, according to canon law, were not only to be excluded from the highest positions, but to lose them if they persisted in 158 See W. E. Green, “Hugh of Saint Victor: De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum,” Speculum 18 (1943), pp. 484 – 93. 159 Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri viii, ed. C. Webb (reprint Frankfurt, 1965), 2, p. 130, 658a and p. 131, 659a, 24–25, with B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, 1964), pp. 87ff.; H. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1,2, p. 287ff.; P. C. Bori, L’interpretazione inﬁnita. L’ermeneutica cristiana antica e le sue transformazioni (Bologna, 1987), pp. 79ff.

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going to the chase. With the status, relative and adaptable, of exempla, is contrasted the authority of the Decretals by Ivo of Chartres. They offered pastoral guidance to bishops, and they are cited in the context of a plea for ofﬁces of state to be kept distinct. The future candidate for the see of Canterbury was reminded, during Theobald’s illness, of the conduct requisite for clerical promotion and the conditions on which it was held. Literature might be manipulated dialectically; but if contingency, circumstances, and context offered extenuation in the malleable realm of letters, there was no appeal, for certain persons, from the rulings of canon law. Instruction and entertainment did not imply the relativism of limitless interpretation, nor was Archbishop Becket allowed to forget his passion for the hunt.160 That prelate, as John described him after his death, had combined outward magniﬁcence with inner humility. “Splendidly dressed, he was poor in spirit; with an expression of gaiety, he was contrite at heart; proffering penury at his opulent table, he frequently left it rather with an empty stomach than refreshed, often more revived than sated.”161 Becket, “in eating and drinking, steered a middle course of temperance lest, as wholly abstinent, he be accused of faddishness or taxed with drunkenness, if he overindulged.”162 A mean between the elegance of a worldly bishop163 and the austerity of a monk was cultivated by the reformed courtier, who had learned the lesson taught at Policraticus 8,6. Neither voluptuousness nor coarseness has a place in the ideal of restraint and moderation which John of Salisbury there terms civility (civilitas), drawing an analogy between the deportment of the civilized man and the abstemiousness of correct style. Chastened, reﬁned, and “Attic,” both are deﬁned by their avoidance of vulgar excess: “He who abandons modesty will very easily lapse from a civilized style of dining into a plebeian one.”164 And if the rules of convivial conduct formulated at Policraticus 8,6 are aligned with those laid down for the practice of literature by Bernard of Chartres at Metalogicon I,24, that did not imply that John perceived reality through the optic of letters, but that the two, for him, were intertwined. How, is illustrated by his analysis of Aeneid I.723–41, 43–49 (with I.216), 160

See below, p. 188. “Et quidem in veste pretiosa spiritu pauper, in facie laeta corde contritus, in mensa lauta penuriam eligens, nonnunquam ventre magis vacuus quam refectus, saepius magis refocillatus quam plenus . . .” Vita 2, in Giovanni di Salisbury, Anselmo e Becket. Due vite, ed. I. Bifﬁ (Milan, 1990), p. 172. 162 “In cibis et potibus temperantiae medium tenuit, ne prorsus abstinens argueretur superstitionis aut immodice sumens crapula gravaretur.” Ibid. 163 See Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness, pp. 19 – 38. 164 “Qui modestiam deserit, ad plebeiam convivandi consuetudinem facillime prolabitur a civili.” Ioannis Saresberiensis Policraticus (ed. Webb), vol. 2, p. 257, 728a, 23 –24. 161

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which enables us to reconstruct the mode of reading that he was encouraging Becket to develop. “Do you see the plan of the splendid banquet, its course and its end?” asks John, appealing to the chancellor’s visual imagination. “[Virgil] indicates that what has gone before was a luxurious and heavy repast, beyond ordinary needs, because he appends the opening statement: After the ﬁrst pause in the feasting

Elsewhere, drawing attention to the sobriety of a more sparing meal that derived its pleasure from bare essentials, he says: After hunger had been removed by food.

Indeed, because food makes men silent, and drink renders them talkative, [Virgil] adds [in the ﬁrst passage] the din and other signs of luxury; which is wise of him.”165 Observe John’s multiple sleights of hand. Virgil is commended for his wisdom—the same writer who, at Policraticus 8,14, is accused of “perverting the truth of history with poetic licence” because he convinced posterity that Dido, a paragon of virtue, was in fact corrupt with unnatural love for a stranger [Aeneas] whom, for chronological reasons, she could not have met.166 Two types of meal are distinguished on the basis of the ﬁrst book of the Aeneid: the decadent banquet, quoted in extenso, and the picnic of the Trojans, evoked in a half-line. What John does not cite are the verses immediately preceding the one that he partially adduces: . . . lying sprawled on the grass they were replete with vintage wine and rich game. (Aeneid I. 214–15).

No matter that none of Dido’s dinner guests, in the twenty-four lines John reproduces, falls under the table; and only a pedant would object that, in order to enable his followers to feast to a satiety unmentioned by our exegete, Aeneas had slain three stags while hunting—an activity that, seven books earlier, the Policraticus had condemned. There are, in John of Salisbury’s literary criticism, both a time and a place 165 “Videsne delicati instituta conuiuii processum et exitum? Superﬂua siquidem praecessisse et luxum epularum grauem fuisse indicat, quod praemisit:

Postquam prima quies epulis Qui alibi, parcioris mensae sobrietatem notans et quae solis necessariis gaudet, ait: Postquam exempta fames epulis Verum, quia cibus homines efﬁcit tacitos, potus loquaces, strepitum et cetera luxus insignia, quae de licentia bibendi proueniunt, prudenter adiunxit.” Ibid., p. 258, 728c-729a, 25 – 34. 166 Ibid., p. 329, 768d, 2– 6.

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for context and occasions when it is more conveniently ignored. As a counter-example to the virtuous Virgil, he comments on the “absurd custom” of praying for divine grace at Christian banquets. “Either God is not sober or drunkenness displeases him. Immoderately they toast moderation . . . and the result is an orgy.” The tousle-haired Iopas at Aeneid I.740, by contrast, does not play on his cyther or crone rustic love songs. His musical accompaniment is suited to the grace of a civil meeting or the dignity of a philosopher. Would that Christians, at their social gatherings, would recall the luxurious banquet of Dido and the music of uncouth Iopas! No exemplum lacks its contrary. Virgil, most learned of poets, offers nothing but material suitable for the ediﬁcation of human nature and morals—a pity, then, that, in the last verse, he describes Dido, under the inﬂuence, “drinking in love.” Aristotle, in Boethius’s translation of the Topics (6.7.146), deﬁned that expression as the sex-drive, which reminds us of how the luxury of Campania corrupted Hannibal. A ﬂood of exempla streams from Valerius Maximus until, by an imperceptible turn in the ﬂow of free association, Becket’s attention can be safely redirected to the text of the Aeneid. If the luxury of Dido’s banquet is attributable to her intemperance, in Book 7.175–83 Aeneas has the good fortune to dine with a man. Evander’s dinner is a model of sobriety and frugality. The queen goes in for frivolity; the king, simple and unsophisticated, prefers discussions of piety, religion, and state order. Where was Becket left? What did John of Salisbury wish to convey to his patron? The image of a “civil banquet,” an instance of temperance? Certainly, in the simple sense that a moral lesson is drawn from literature, but for that edifying purpose Virgil was hardly needed. The Aeneid is adduced, at Policraticus 8,6, to illustrate the contention of Metalogicon I,24 that the foundation of any philosophy could be found in poetry. John’s emphasis was on limitlessness. His point was not just to illustrate the idea, commonplace since antiquity, of the poet as a source of encyclopedic knowledge but to show how the Aeneid could be made into the “seasoning” of all possible interpretations. Pretext for hermeneutic dexterity, literature manipulated in this way might seem to suggest that meaning was so plural as to be inﬁnite. Not so, argues John of Salisbury. Simplicity could be restored and control exerted by a reader trained in the methods perfected by him. Stimulating his pupil by his inventiveness, John asserts his own authority. His choice of parallel passages, analyzed and compared, commits both the author and the audience to the internal logic of his procedure. Textual ﬁdelity coincides with freedom in handling the work—truncating it, when desirable for his own purposes, interpreting selected extracts both pro and contra a given thesis. And to the objection that this exegesis is arbitrary, a telling answer is prepared. Does Becket not “see,” by himself, all that John points out to him? Are the writings not laid before his gaze, the theme

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stated in the chapter-heading? If, reveling in his liberty and ability to gloss or glide from one passage to the next, John of Salisbury treats the auctores as his “clients” or his “slaves,” they serve the same purpose as “lies suited to the occasion.”167 As in the Metalogicon, so in the Policraticus, criteria not of truth but of probability offer ﬂexible rules for this game. Drawn into the serious sport of reading, Becket is invited to congratulate himself on his cleverness. Invited to John’s civil banquet of the mind, the chancellor comes as a bidden guest, prepared not for veriﬁcation but complicity. John’s technique had a target. Virgil was a writer in vogue among twelfthcentury exponents of integumentum-theory.168 On one of them, Bernardus Silvestris, the Policraticus draws directly.169 Yet the critical emphasis on fabula in the integumental exegesis of John’s generation provokes some of his harshest attacks. Again, as in the Metalogicon’s account of recent developments in logic and dialectic, it is the actuality of the critique that establishes his own position. “You’ll be either beaten or accused of ignorance, if you do not know the ﬁctions (ﬁgmenta) that, in our day, pass for a liberal education,” he states sarcastically at Policraticus I, 4. Sharing with the illusions of hunters the aim of providing, on such a slender basis, a complete training, the purveyors of ﬁgmenta offered a shortcut to the heights of happiness, which the ancients did not believe could be reached except by effort.170 Knowledge, on John of Salisbury’s theory, was not to be acquired in a rush. It entailed a long and laborious journey along the route of tradition toward a goal the present could attain only with the aid of the past.171 Not advance but decline and fall were presaged by the taste for fabula.172 Progress was to be achieved by cutting the knot of ambiguity.173 Ambiguity was the domain of obscurantists, deceivers, and charlatans. That is why it was employed, to pernicious ends, in oracles.174 A contrast was thus 167 Policraticus 1, prol.p.24,110ff. with P. von Moos, “Fictio auctorism Eine theoriegeschichtliche Miniatur am Rande der Institutio Traiani,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter 1, ed. H. Fuhrmann, MGH Schriften (Hannover, 1988), pp. 752ff. 168 See below, pp. 233ff. and cf. P. Dronke, “Integumenta Virgilii,” in id., Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome, 1992), pp. 63 –79 and C. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England. Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 84–130. See further below. 169 See J. Martin in World of John of Salisbury, pp. 197ff. Cf. S. Lerer, “John of Salisbury’s Virgil,” Vivarium 20 (1982), pp. 24 – 39. 170 Policraticus, p. 31, 64 –71. 171 Cf. U. Odoj, Wissenschaft und Politik bei Johannes von Salisbury, diss. Munich, 1974. 172 “Nostra aetas prolapsa ad fabulas et quaevis inania non modo aures et cor prostituit vanitati, sed oculorum et aurium voluptate suam mulcet desidiam.” Ibid. 1,8, p. 53, 21–24. 173 Ibid., 3, prol., p. 172. 174 Ibid., 2,27, p. 148, 36 - 149, 69.

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drawn between their fallacies and the canonical truths of historia, an opposition established between the language of mystiﬁcation and plain scrutiny. The one clouded and confused, the other clariﬁed. But perspicuity is not the same as simplemindedness. John’s model is provided by the academici, sceptical yet faithful interpreters, as opposed to the “arrogance of the unskilled multitude.”175 That expression, at Policraticus 7,9, recalls Metalogicon I,24. The arrogant and ignorant multitude were those who had spurned John’s teachers, William of Conches and Richard Bishop. Look, he urges, at the masters who prevailed—“the rulers over the philosophers of our times”—surrounded by a throng of listeners, to whom they announced their highsounding message. They were obsessed with details, not with solutions. Incapable of simplifying their complex but trivial problems, they transmitted them to posterity.176 Darkness was their favorite haunt, sleights of hand their methods. Changeable like Proteus, they tormented and distorted the text. The misused immanence of the work and the multiplication of its internal difﬁculties, without reference to setting, purpose, or character, are John’s targets in the polemic of the Policraticus. His attack was simultaneously a self-defense. Eschewing the form of a self-sufﬁcient commentary in the manner of Bernardus Silvestris, John’s exegesis of the “civil banquet” at 8,6 is followed by his arguments against Epicureanism in chapters 24 and 25 of the same book. What linked them was not the hidden harmony between Christian thought and pagan literature that integumentum-theory set out to disclose, but its opposite: the distinction in the question begged by the phrase, “if it is permissible for a Christian to use a pagan’s words.”177 For Christianity to be combined with paganism, it was necessary to separate the author of a poem from his style and persona. This John proceeds to do, at Policraticus 3,8, where the reference—signiﬁcantly—is to the Mathematicus by Bernardus Silvestris.178 That “excellent contemporary writer, although he used the words of pagans,” and his integumental approach are attacked in Book 7. Bernardus, in his reading of Virgil, veered between direct allegory—Iopas, at Dido’s feast, represents boyish talkativeness or speech without form;179 Anchises is the heavenly father; the Sibyl divine wisdom; the golden bough learning or virtue180 —and an endless proliferation of meaning.181 John, by con175

Cf. von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 384ff. Policraticus, ed. Webb, p. 123, 654b, 15ff. 177 Ibid., 8, 24, p. 415, 10 –11. 178 “Quidam temporis nostri scriptor egregius, inﬁdelium tamen verbis . . .” Policraticus, p. 195, 115–18. On the Mathematicus, see below pp. 246ff. 179 Jones and Jones, p. 13, 9 –11. 180 Martin, in World of John of Salisbury, pp. 200 –207. 181 Jones and Jones, Commentary on the “Aeneid,” p. 9,16ff. 176

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trast, elaborates a moralizing message, censuring multiloquium, or wordiness, as sin.182 Mercury, for Bernard a ﬁgure of measureless hermeneutic freedom, is subordinated in the Policraticus to ratio; and reason teaches the limits of puerile understanding: a greater suspicion of Virgil, a desire to limit—not augment—the range of signiﬁcation in his text lead, in the ﬁnal chapter, to an identiﬁcation of the tree of wisdom and the bough of life with Christian truths, where ambiguity has no purchase. While exploiting the intrinsic polyvalency of the work, John’s interpretation is bent on deﬁning its external limits by standards of virtuous conduct. Pagan writing is useless unless it contributes to happiness. Happiness, as Epicurus misconstrued it, should not be confused with splendor or show;183 and here the argument returns to Becket. He may continue to dress with style and dine with pomp; to enjoy honors, wealth, and fame but, even among the tumult of war, he should preserve his innocence. “Do not read my book,” declares John, “if you have neither time nor taste, but remember that it stands or falls under your lordship”: liber enim hic . . . tibi domino stat aut cadit.184 The public voice of the counseller is modulated by the intimate tones of the confessor, as the chancellor in the camp at Toulouse is recalled from the temptations of military glory to a sphere he may patronize but not dominate. Domination is the attribute of the tyrant.185 Domination, violence, and torture are the metaphors in which the hermeneutic practice of Abelard’s school is described in the Metalogicon. John deﬁnes his own, by antithesis, at Policraticus 7, 13, where he cites the verses of Bernard of Chartres quoted by Hugh of Saint-Victor. Turning up his nose at the master’s style, John approves of his sense. The lines emphasize humility, to which is added simplicity. “It is a fool who attempts to assert his mastery over the writings from which he should learn and, taking possession of their meaning, strives to drag them, kicking and screaming, in the direction of his own interpretation. . . . We should serve, not dominate, what is written. . . .”186 Illustrating his own standards in an ex182

Ibid., p. 25,2–14. Cf. P. Delhaye, “Le bien suprême d’après Jean de Salisbury,” RTAM 20 (1953), pp. 203–21. 184 Policraticus 8, 25 (ed. Webb), p. 425, 822b, 1–2. 185 “Dicitur autem quia tirannus est, qui violentia dominatione populum premit: sed tamen non modo in populo sed in quantavis paucitate potest quisque suam tirannidem exercere. Nam etsi non populo, tamen quatenus quisque potest dominatur.” Policraticus 7, 17 (ed. Webb), p. 161, 675d, 29ff. with C. J. Nederman, “The Changing Face of Tyranny: The Reign of King Stephen in John of Salisbury’s Political Thought,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 33 (1989), p. 9 and, in general, J. van Laarhoven, “Thou Shalt Not Slay a Tyrant! The SoCalled Theory of John of Salisbury,” in The World of John of Salisbury, pp. 319 – 42. 186 “Ineptus enim est, qui scripturis, a quibus instruendus est, appetit dominari et captivato sensu earum ad intellectum suum eas nititur trahere repugnantes. . . . Serviendum est 183

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egesis, both faithful and free, of Bernard’s poem, John passes from the literal to the allegorical and moral levels of their meaning, surpassing Hugh of Saint-Victor in the application of his own methods. If Hugh aimed to achieve harmony between discrepant sources and to extract clarity from darkness, he recommended modesty, accompanied by literalness, as a precondition for knowledge.187 Transposing, in the Metalogicon, the same criteria to a system of learning that lent a prominence to profane literature denied it by the Victorine school, John implemented them in the Policraticus. Reintroduced from the unfashionable province, the approach represented by Bernard of Chartres combined the advantages, and combatted the drawbacks, of learning at the capital. The Paris of Becket’s and John’s youth is the intellectual setting of the Policraticus and Metalogicon. They offered the chancellor and potential archbishop not “mirrors for princes” but the models of moral education, with reading at their center, which his imperfect training had failed to provide. To the “scholar de dimanche,”188 the Metalogicon and Policraticus showed that the level of grammatica above which he had barely risen was neither elementary nor tedious, as so many of his contemporaries asserted. Literature reaching out to embrace every ﬁeld of enquiry was, as John viewed it, a preparation for life. Its regime, rigorous but not austere, made allowance for Becket as he was. The otherworldliness of the cloister was not to be demanded from the future prelate. The Victorine model could be adapted, and modiﬁed, to the needs of political conduct. Sainte-Geneviève, however, offered no viable example. Static and sterile, the dialecticians on the mount had severed contact with reality and were entangled in a web of words. Ambiguity, equivocality, polysemy: none of their favorite problems was resolvable by the hairsplitting of logical analysis, for meaning is not the product of verba but an aspect of res.189 That is why, in the last two chapters of the Policraticus, John of Salisbury both draws on and modiﬁes Bernardus Silvestris. Inspired less by elation at “the discovery of nature” than by a somber consciousness of humanity’s fallen state,190 the preacher against sinfulness emphasizes divine wisdom. Taking the schema Bernardus derived from Fulgentius and applied to the ﬁrst six books of the Aeneid in order to interpret them as an allegory of the ages of humanity, John stations “the cover of ﬁction” at “the ergo scripturis, non dominandum.” Policraticus, 7, 13, pp. 147– 48, 667b, 1– 4, and cf. p. 145, 666d, 7–14. 187 Cf. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1,2, p. 300. 188 Smalley, Becket Conﬂict, p. 112. 189 Policraticus, 7, 13 (ed. Webb), pp. 143 – 44, 666a, 28 - 666b, 17. 190 Ibid., 8, 24, p. 413, 815c, 8ff.

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conﬁnes of adolescence.” What his model and rival presented as a feature of fruitful polysemy is dismissed as the multiloquium of immaturity,191 beyond which John seeks to guide Becket toward the ﬁfth age, with its goal of maturitas civilis. There, without abandoning the world, he might regard social and political virtue through the optic of a hermeneutics adapted to contemporary culture. And there is ample evidence that his patron, soon after acquiring the ofﬁce that was in John’s mind as he wrote the Metalogicon and Policraticus, had need of such help. Custom decreed that, at the archbishop’s consecration in 1162, the gospels be opened at random and a passage read aloud. When this was done, in the presence of the prince Henry, the royal justiciar, and the suffragan bishops,192 there appeared Matthew 21:19 with Christ’s curse on the barren ﬁg tree: “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforth for ever.” How was this text to be interpreted? Literally, allegorically, or tropologically? Such questions, unanswerable by Becket, exposed the vulnerability of his position in a culture that linked exegesis of the divine word with the episcopal ofﬁce. The problem became more acute as the conﬂict with Henry II worsened. In the summer of 1166, Becket’s enemies among the English bishops appealed against him to Rome. Behind their action John of Salisbury detected the hand of Gilbert Foliot who, four years earlier, had sarcastically commented that the king had performed a miracle by transforming a layman and knight into an archbishop. Becket wrote tartly to Foliot, who replied with force.193 His letter, a masterpiece of rhetoric,194 is our source for the awkwardness caused, in 1162, by Matthew’s prognosticon. The apostle, according to his cunning interpreter, was “virtually a prophet” (Matheo quasi vaticinante). On the day of Becket’s consecration—no later—it would have been ﬁtting (oportuisset) to reply to a king whose commands were unjust that “it is proper to obey God rather than humans” (Acts 5,29). Correctly employing the impersonal verb misconstrued at Sens by Hilary of Chichester, Foliot dwelled on the ambiguity of the archbishop created by Henry II, whose authority Becket was now challenging.195 Likening the contested primate to the Antichrist, the bishop of London also drew on arguments from life. Harmony and peace had reigned in England before Becket’s accession to Canterbury, with one glaring exception—the funds exacted to ﬁnance the campaign, led by the then chancel191

Ibid., p. 416, 817b, 4ff. Barlow, Becket, p. 73. 193 The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. A. Morey and C. Brooke (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 229–43 (no. 170) with Morey and Brooke, Gilbert Foliot, pp. 166ff. 194 Ibid., p. 167. 195 Letters and Charters, p. 232, 92–104. 192

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Toulouse.196

lor, at Henry II’s policy was unheard of, Beckett objected. Was it not unheard of that a court ofﬁcial be suddenly transferred to the head of the English church? How could one who today had run the royal administration tomorrow be in charge of spiritual affairs? Incongruously stationed before the altar, he was more familiar with hawks and hounds.197 All this amounted to something subtler than an attempt to discredit the archbishop by recalling the chancellor or “trying to show that the old Adam was still governing Becket.”198 Foliot’s arguments were familiar to their target. They inverted the same techniques and used the same examples John of Salisbury had employed in the Policraticus. The approach advocated in the Policraticus had failed, was Foliot’s implication. Becket had been unsuitable in 1162, and nothing had changed: “He was always a fool, and a fool he remains.” Writing down to the former chancellor with a palpable (and justiﬁed) sense of intellectual superiority, this theologian trained in the schools was at pains to show that he commanded a culture that Becket did not possess in 1166 and would never acquire. The pains he took, as archbishop, to master the Bible with Herbert of Bosham;199 the efforts made by him to assemble a learned entourage and a library stocked with “aids to study”200 were all attempts to compensate for lacunae that placed him at a grave disadvantage in debate with other members of his order. Exile might have done Becket good, quod ad litteraturam et mores, but he was still reliant on his erudite advisers. So it was that John of Salisbury replied to Foliot’s letter. Indirectly, in an open epistle to Baldwin, archdeacon of Totnes and future archbishop of Canterbury,201 John answered the charges. “The ruler of the synagogue,” with his aggressive tactics of biblical quotation, was confronted by a matching strategy. Amassing an armory of citations from scripture equal to Foliot’s, John accused him of dishonest exegesis—of “fraudulently interpreting words to suit his will, not the intention of the writer.” The “ruler of the synagogue and his accomplices” “twisted the law, refusing to adopt their own understanding to it, and making every effort to make it appear that what suits them was in conformity with God’s ruling.”202 Ignoring the obligation of ﬁdelity, Foliot imposed on it his arbi196

Ibid., p. 232, 105 –108. Ibid., p. 238, 312ff. 198 Morey and Brooke, Gilbert Foliot, p. 179. 199 Barlow, Becket, p. 80. 200 Smalley, Becket Conﬂict, pp. 135 – 37. 201 Ep. 187, in The Letters of John of Salisbury 2, pp. 230 – 50. 202 “. . . fraudulenta verborum interpretatione ad arbitrium, non ad mentem auctoris, detorquent legem, eique nolunt suum accommodare intellectum, sed id agunt modis omnibus ut, quod eis libitum fuerit, divino quoque iuri consentaneum videatur.” Ibid., p. 232. 197

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trary readings with the insolence of a “Corniﬁcian.” The religious metaphors of John’s polemic, in the Metalogicon and Policraticus, were now restored to their literal meaning as the bishop of London was condemned, for his exegetical sins, as a heretic. Subverting that basis of freedom found in the faithful interpretation of the divine word,203 Foliot had acted like a tyrant. That term was, to the readers of John’s two major works, familiar but not ﬁgurative. A long list of examples followed.204 Deny the many instances that the clergy are the successors of the tribe of Levi, and you dismiss the entire hermeneutic tradition as worthless.205 Authority, revealed and transmitted, now annexed to his side, Becket’s champion argued that the travails of his patron at Clarendon and Northampton might, and should, be seen sub specie aeternitatis. What mattered was less a passing misjudgment or a misapprehended act than a sempiternal struggle between justice and tyranny. When Christ said, “As I hear, I judge,” “hear” was used in the sense of “understand.”206 Understanding, implied to be lacking in Foliot, should not construe Becket as Thomas—as a Londoner, a clerk, or a prelate—but as the living link between the apostles and a church endangered in the present.207 Once the companion of the powerful in their low pursuits, he had been acceptable to all.208 “All” included Foliot. Now that he had thrown off his old self, Becket was decried by the enemies of Ecclesia—among whom John numbered the bishop of London. Cast in Foliot’s own terms while reversing his charges, the case pressed by the “nonprofessional” philosopher used the dialectical resources of the Metalogicon and the hermeneutic techniques of the Policraticus to defend his master’s cause. That literature should not be divided from life remained John’s position until his ability to act and to write, as apologist and counsellor, reached its limit on the dark afternoon of December 29, 1170. Then the knights, having argued furiously with Becket, stormed out of the hall at Canterbury. “That is what you have always been like,” complained John of Salisbury, “You invariably act and speak on your own, without taking advice.”209 Such was the criticism made of the archbishop by Hilary of Chichester at Sens in 1164, and again it was ignored. Becket did not lack advisors, prudent and wise, combining high culture and noble 203

Metalogicon 1,12, p. 32,15 –18. Pace Barlow, Becket, p. 156. 205 Letters 2, p. 236. 206 Ibid., p. 238. 207 Ibid., p. 246. 208 Ibid., p. 244. 209 See D. Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1963), p. 125. 204

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ideals with sound pragmatic sense, but he chose to follow his course that led to the grave. About the ambiguity of the pupil-master to whom his career and writings were bound, John says nothing. The sensus litteralis prevailed. But “literal” in which sense? The answer, he had stated, depended on the intention of the auctor, and Becket remained self-willed to the last. Having failed to form their policraticus, the verbal arts now turned to commemorate a martyr of his own making.

H

H

VI ARCHNESS Meum est propositum in taberna mori, ut sint vina proxima morientis ori. Tunc cantabunt letius angelorum chori: “Sit Deus propitius huic potatori!” It is my intention to die in a pub, to have wines in reach at my last gasp. Then angelic choirs shall sing jubilantly: “May God take mercy on this drinker!”

P

OTATORI / PECCATORI: the pun is among the most famous in the Latin literature of the twelfth century. Who does not chuckle at the deftness with which the Archpoet, altering a single syllable, transforms the piety of an apostle’s prayer (Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori, Luke 18:13) into a provocation that occupies the middle ground between wit and blasphemy?1 Who can fail to admire his literary art?2 It consists, we are told, in subtle irony and skillful parody—and there, at the verbal level, reﬂection halts. Seldom are the questions posed of why, in the twelfth-century culture where he lived and worked, the Archpoet played so daringly with the sacred and the secular, or what were his aim and point. Patronage is the usual answer, amply justiﬁed by the extant works. In most of them, datable to 1162–64, this importunate charmer pleads for support, sustenance, or forgiveness. Not that he is to be taken literally. The time has past when we believed in “wandering scholars” devoted to wine, women, and song. Many of them have been exposed as pillars of the establishment—as teachers, administrators, diplomats—and even the elusive Archpoet has been assigned a respectable identity as one of two Rudolfs, notaries in the service of Reinald of Dassel, archbishop-elect of Cologne and arch-chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa.3 For the colorful romantic

1 Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, 10, 12, 1– 4, ed. H. Watenphul and H. Krefeld (Heidelberg, 1958), p. 75. For the “Pharisaical” misuse of the biblical quotation in a monastic context, cf. Alan of Lille, Sermo de Trinitate, ed. M.-T. d’Alverny, Alain de Lille. Textes inédits (Paris, 1965), p. 261. 2 Cf. P. Dronke, “The Archpoet and the Classics,” in Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition, pp. 57–72 and id., “The Art of the Archpoet: A Reading of Lingua balbus,” in The Interpretation of Medieval Lyric Poetry, ed. W. Jackson (New York, 1980), pp. 22– 43. 3 See R. Schieffer, “Bleibt der Archipoeta anonym?” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österre-

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image of the vagantes, modern research has substituted a reality as solemn and gray as its own. Something is missing. A sense of intellectual audacity, for example, and of the complexity this challenging writer never fails to convey. If the Archpoet was a product of the schools and the chancery, what was the effect of his verse on the viri docti, fellow-clerics in the arch-chancellor’s entourage, among whom he numbers his denouncers? Why, in order to commend himself to his patron, does he adopt the penitent’s pose? And why is the admission of his failings designed to inspire not correction but complicity? These questions lead us beyond the texts to their contexts: to the Archpoet’s milieu and, in particular, to the ﬁgure whose sympathies he sought to engage—Reinald of Dassel.4 Reinald was different from Thomas Becket. Unlike the archbishop of Canterbury, the archbishop-elect of Cologne had nothing of the saint. No loyalty to Rome divided Barbarossa’s man from the monarch whom he served; and if overzealousness in what he took to be the imperial cause at times caused ﬁction with his master, Reinald was acknowledged for his singleminded pursuit of honor imperii.5 Single-mindedness did not preclude headstrong conﬁdence, with which that proud prelate’s followers had to reckon. There was no possibility, for the Archpoet, of assuming the role of guide and counselor which John of Salisbury played with the ill-prepared Becket. Trilingual in Latin, German, and French,6 Reinald moved with assurance in the learned and vernacular culture of the international clergy. He differed from the archbishop of Canterbury not only in his ecclesiastiichische Geschichtsforschung 98 (1990), pp. 59 –79 and J. Fried, “Der Archipoeta—ein Kölner Scholaster?” Ex ipsis rerum documentis. Beiträge zur Mediävistik. Festschrift H. Zimmermann, ed. K. Herbers (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 85– 90. Doubted by P. Dronke in Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, ed. and trans. F. Adock, Cambridge Medieval Classics 4 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. xx-xxii. See further below. 4 See R. Herkenrath, Reinald von Dassel. Reichskanzler und Erzbischof von Köln, diss. Graz (1962). Cf. A. Stelzmann, “Rainald von Dassel und seine Reichspolitik,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 25 (1950), pp. 60 – 82 and W. Grobe, “Studien zur geistigen Welt Rainalds von Dassel,” in Friedrich Barbarossa, ed. G. Wolf (Darmstadt, 1975), pp. 245– 96. 5 Cf. Frederick’s letter on Reinald’s death in August 1167: “. . . in morte dilectissimi nostri Reinoldi Coloniensis archiepiscopi beatae memoriae tristitiam nobis incusserit, quantum vero ex repentina et inopinata vocatione eius doloris cordi meo vulnus inﬂixerit, a prudentia vestra non credimus alienum. Huius enim summum desiderium et perseverantis animi propositum semper extitit honorem imperii et reipublicae augmentum privatis suis commodis anteponere et quicquid ad gloriam nostram conducere visum fuit ardenter promovere.” Ed. J. Böhmer, Acta imperii selecta. Urkunden deutscher Könige und Kaiser mit einem Anhange von Reichsacten (Innsbruck, 1870), p. 118 (no. 126). 6 For Reinald’s trilingualism cf. Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 14, 18 in Saxonis Gesta Danorum, ed. J. Olrik and H. Raeder (Havniae, 1931), p. 443.

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cal and political views but also in his possession of the qualities summed up by the phrase optime litteratus.7 At Paris, in the school of Adam of Balsham, who assigned central importance to problems of ambiguity and polyvalence,8 Reinald had received his academic training. Common interests they had shared, as students, in the philosophy taught there were recalled, in a letter of congratulation to the archbishop-elect, by Abbot Egbert of Schönau.9 From Paris Egbert had returned with an enthusiasm for the Victorines which Reinald did not share. His tastes inclined rather to the dialectic and disputations mistrusted by the spirituales in the cloister. Their prim orthodoxy was ironized by the Archpoet when, describing a vision of heaven to his patron, he excluded Aristotle and Homer.10 Not the sages of pagan antiquity, with whose works the worldly archbishop-elect vaunted his acquaintance, but the “great Augustine” had revealed the truth de sententiis nominum et rerum, /de naturis generum atque specierum.11 These were standard topics of philosophical debate, with which Reinald was familiar from Adam’s lectures. Citing the saint’s authority to his unsaintly master, the Archpoet aped the either/or-mentality of those, like the Victorines and Cistercians, who argued for the separation of religious and secular learning. Proﬁcient in both (pollens . . ./in humanis artibus et divinis litteris12), the patron was invited to react with the urbane mirth of an intellectual, like his client, formed in the schools. Outside the schools, after his studies, Reinald as provost of Hildesheim, in which the sic et non-method began to be developed,13 had continued to play the same game. A letter by him, addressed in December 1149 to the powerful Abbot Wibald of Stablo and Corvey about his request for works by Cicero,14 provides an indication of the culture of the higher clergy in 7 Acerbus Morena, Historia Frederici 1, ed. F. Güterbock in MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum n.s. 7 (Berlin, 1930), p. 168. 8 See above, p. 169 with L. Minio-Paluello, “The Ars disserendi of Adam of Balsham “Parvipontanus,”” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1954), pp. 116 – 69. For context see J. Ehlers, “Deutsche Scholaren in Frankreich während des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel der höhen und späten Mitelaltens, ed. J. Fried, pp. 97–120. 9 “ipsa est, que in diebus adolescentie nostre conglutinavit mentes nostras, quando in scola electissima nostri amabilis doctoris domini Ade viri eminentissimi tam vita quam scientia simul dulces capiebamus cibos philosophice doctrine.” Ed. F. Roth, Die Visionen der heiligen Elisabeth und die Schriften der Äbte Egbert und Emecho von Schönau (Brühn, 1884), pp. 311–12. 10 Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, 5,7,1, p. 62. 11 Ibid., 5, 7, 2–3. 12 Ibid., 7,3,1–2, p. 66. 13 M. Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode 1 (Freiburg, 1909), pp. 234ff. 14 P. Jaffé, ed., Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, 1: Monumenta Corbeiensia (reprint Aalen, 1964), pp. 326 –27 (no. 207). On Wibald cf. P. Munz, Frederich Barbarossa. A Study in Medieval Politics (London, 1969), pp. 46 – 47.

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imperial service and anticipates some of the Archpoet’s distinctive themes. One of them was an insistence on reciprocality, an openness about mutual favors summed up in the phrase do, ut des.15 “If you want Cicero from me, send me Aulus Gellius and Origen,” wrote Reinald, combining the banter of a trade-off with an air of pretended piety. “I know that you are a Christian, not a Ciceronian,” he declared to Wibald, in an adage of Saint Jerome that was so commonplace in the Latin literature of the High Middle Ages as to have become a cliché. Reinald’s intention was to spoof an eager moralism, and the humor of his admonition derived from its superﬂuousness. The abbot of Corvey was not a turncoat, but an explorer, an investigator, or a spy into the camps of the enemy. This unidentiﬁed allusion was capped by an offer of the latest literature imported from France. With a mock-solemnity that matched Reinald’s own, Wibald replied to the letter.16 He had spotted the reference to investigation or sleuth, which derived from Seneca, and rose to the challenge. Reinald, answered the abbot of Corvey, should avoid the occupations of the laity. They were “like deadly poison for the soul.” Outdoing his correspondent in the austerity of his rhetoric, Wibald did not mean it in earnest. What this collector of Cicero’s works objected to was less the study of the liberal arts than the lack of intellectual focus, which he likened to a ball game. There lay the danger for Reinald—in dilettantism and eclecticism, not in the “apostacy” so naïvely denounced by the enemies of secular learning. A gifted prince of the church should not behave like a gentleman of letters and disperse his talents. Seriousness of purpose was required and, as if to indicate a sphere in which he could foresee that it would be necessary, Wibald sent, as the ecclesiastical politician who was to succeed him as Barbarossa’s advisor, not the antiquarian Aulus Gellius but Frontinus on the art of war. Distance, marked by irony, characterized Reinald’s attitude toward the strictness of the spirituales and the rigor of the reformers. His ﬁrst appearance in the public debates of the church made his outlook plain. During the council of Reims in 1148, as recorded by John of Salisbury, the then provost of Hildesheim objected to the decretal banning parti-colored fur cloaks for the clergy.17 This issue was not trivial. The splendor of a prelate’s appearance—particularly but not exclusively in Germany—was a visible sign of his status that Reinald, as archbishop, was to exploit to the full.18 15

6,42, p. 66. Jaffé, ed., pp. 327–28 (no. 208). 17 Historia Pontiﬁcalis 3, p. 8 with J. Spörl, “Rainald von Dassel auf dem Konzil von Reims 1148 und sein Verhältnis zu Johannes von Salisbury,” Historisches Jahrbuch 60 (1940), pp. 250–57. 18 Cf. J. Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter. Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höﬁschen Literatur in Deutschland 1150 –1300 (Munich, 1979), p. 158. 16

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Opposing the decretal of 1148, he was both setting his face against one of the reforms proposed by Bernard of Clairvaux’s circle and announcing the spirit and the style in which Barbarossa’s edict of 1165–66 against the Cistercians would be couched.19 “Under their tunics,” begins that document, the order fomented rebellion against the authority of the emperor and the unity of the church. Their garments of outward piety were a camouﬂage for inner hypocrisy, a cover for discord. Hypocritical champions of orthodoxy, they fomented schism and heresy. The Cistercians were not men of religion but ﬁlii seculi. Undue proximity to the laity and neglect of spiritual matters were also discussed at the council of Reims. There was general agreement, reports John of Salisbury, uno tamen excepto. The exception was Reinald, in league with “the other Germans.” John’s insinuation was hostile, but his interpretation may be accepted. What he represented as isolation, the provost of Hildesheim and his allies viewed as a separateness intended to be permanent. Dissociating himself from the reformers, Reinald also spoke in the name of subsequent generations: decretum hoc nec placere presentibus nec posteris placiturum. Seventeen years later, Barbarossa’s use of sartorial metaphors against the Cistercians demonstrated that coats, tunics, and mantles (both literal and ﬁgurative) still had a place in the polemic of the imperial cause. That is why, when we read the “Mantelgedichte” by the Archpoet, before we conclude that he is employing a topos of Latin literature,20 it may be worth pausing to recall when and for whom he wrote. Topical language, during the strife of the 1160s, could be lent actual reference. No one, not even his enemies, doubted the archbishop of Cologne’s determination or shrewdness. “More cunning than the serpent, you are deceived by none,” declared the Archpoet, after asserting the contrary: Reinald’s dovelike simplicity.21 Mightier than Alexander, gentler than David, more generous than Martin, he was the arbiter of imperial affairs, the inspirer and associate of Barbarossa’s designs.22 Viget tanto socio mens Romani principis (7,7,3): an active partner in planning, an indispensable agent of the emperor’s strategy, the arch-chancellor, acting on the author19 T. Reuter, “Das Edikt Friederich Barbarossas gegen die Zisterzienser,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 84 (1976), pp. 328– 36, esp. 336 and cf. F. Opll, Friedrich Barbarossa (Darmstadt, 1996), pp. 201ff. 20 Cf. P. Latzke, “Der Topos Mantelgedicht,” MlJb 6 (1970), pp. 109 – 31 and A. Betten, “Lateinische Beutellyrik: Literarische Topik oder Ausdruck existentieller Not?” MlJb 11 (1976), pp. 143–50. 21 “columba simplicior nulli fraudes ingeris, / serpente callidior a nullo deciperis.” Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, 7,5,2– 3, p. 67. 22 Ibid., 7,6 –7, p. 67.

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ity of his master and on his own,23 had many of the attributes of a secular prince. As imperial legate in Italy during 1158, Reinald, according to Rahewin,24 differed from his fellow-ambassador Otto of Wittelsbach by the mildness and mercifulness appropriate to his clerical order. A view unlikely to have been shared by the three hundred Ravenese who were allegedly routed in that year by ten knights under his command; or by the Milanese forces defeated by his troops on August 8, 1161; or by the thousands of Romans (including two cardinals) killed or wounded at the battle of Tusculum by an army led by that bellicose clergyman ﬁghting “as savagely as a leopard” (ferax ut leopardus.)25 The Italian recipients of Reinald’s mansuetudo et misericordia, hard-pressed to tell the difference between this soldier of Christ and a military commander, might have been more inclined to accept the Archpoet’s comparison of his patron to Alexander. If that analogy could have been applied to the Becket who besieged Toulouse in 1159, it was unthinkable after 1162. From then until 1164, the Archpoet continued to praise the archbishop-elect of Cologne for qualities that the archbishop of Canterbury did not possess. Eloquence in the learned language was among them. Commanding the style and polish of Cicero, Reinald was “readier with the word than Ulysses.”26 Not only oratorical skill was implied by this likeness but also slyness and calculation— the calliditas to which the Archpoet, like others,27 referred two lines later. Underscoring the same point, he extolled the arch-chancellor for possessing “the voice of Ulysses and the mind of Nestor.”28 Wisdom and prudence found expression in carefully crafted speech. Linking the verbal skills of his patron to Reinald’s foresight and cunning, the Archpoet referred, in his presence, to qualities already tried and tested in the political arena. At the Diet of Besançon in 1157 the papal legates (one of whom was the future Pope Alexander III),29 before reading aloud a letter from Adrian IV, greeted Barbarossa in the name of the holy father and the sacred college— 23 R. Herkenrath, “I collaboratori tedeschi di Federico I,” in Frederico Barbarossa nel dibattito storiograﬁco in Italia e in Germania, ed. R. Manselli and J. Riedmann, Annali del istituto storico italo-germanico (Bologna, 1982), pp. 199 –232, esp. 217–19. 24 Gesta Frederici 3, 22, p. 440. 25 Annales Cameracenses in MGH Scriptores 16 (Hannover, 1849; reprint 1963), p. 519. 26 Carm. 7,5,1, p. 67. 27 Cf. Philip of Harvengt’s letter of congratulation to Reinald on his election as archbishop of Cologne: “Bene rei veritatem intellectu lincaeo pervidisti. . . .” PL 203, 162. 28 “Archicancellarie . . ./in quo mens est Nestoris et vox Ulixea.” Carm. 4,33,2, p. 61. 29 See W. Ullmann, “Cardinal Roland and the Incident at Besançon,” Miscellanea Historiae Pontiﬁciae 18 (1954), pp. 107–25 and K. Heinmeyer, “Beneﬁcium—non feudum sed bonum factum. Der Streit auf dem Reichstag zu Besançon 1157,” Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 15 (1969), pp. 155 –236.

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brothers.”30

“he like a father, they as The emperor, described by Bishop Sichard of Cremona as illiteratus, sed morali scientia doctus,31 did not need to know Latin in order to understand the insinuation. Demoted to a rank equivalent to that of a cardinal, he was upbraided for “dissimulation” and “negligence” in the case of Archbishop Eskil of Lund, captured and mistreated on German territory. Barbarossa, declared Adrian IV, had been misled by an evil advisor. The Roman church, which had met the emperor’s desires in other respects, would have been willing to confer on him yet greater beneﬁcia, if he would behave himself. Reinald of Dassel, probably the “wicked counselor” to whom the letter referred, translated that word into German as Lehen, implying that the emperor stood in a relationship of feudal dependence from the pope. The result was an uproar. Violence against the legates was averted only by Barbarossa’s intervention. Rahewin, in the Gesta Frederici, made two comments on Reinald’s translation, both of them revealing. Beneﬁcia was an ambiguous term. It could mean good deeds (Wohltaten) as well as ﬁefs (Lehen), and it was therefore imperative for this partisan of the imperial cause to defend Reinald’s accuracy. “A very faithful translation,” commented Rahewin, substituting, in an authorial or scribal variant, “exceedingly” for “very.”32 The change betrayed ill ease. Reinald’s rendering of beneﬁcia was faithful to the tone of the pope’s letter, but one-sided in its interpretation. A context had therefore to be established, in order to demonstrate how “exact” and “literal” his version was. Had not witnesses heard the Romans “rashly” assert that the German kings ruled over the holy city and Italy by the grace and favor of the popes? Was there not a mosaic in the Lateran palace depicting the Emperor Lothar as a papal vassal? The hermeneutics of veriﬁcation, with their emphasis on context being developed at Paris by Robert of Melun and others,33 found a secular counterpart in this exegesis of Adrian IV’s letter by the outraged aristocracy of Barbarossa. At the heart of the interpretative conﬂict stood Reinald of Dassel, whom the same document described in biblical terms that recalled the devil.34 Diabolically clever in its simplicity was the manner in which he had 30

Gesta Frederici 3,10, p. 410. Quoted by H. Grundmann, “Litteratus-illiteratus. Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter,” in id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 3: Bildung und Sprache (Stuttgart, 1978), p. 26 and cf. pp. 45ff. See too P. Ganz, “Friedrich Barbarossa: Hof und Kultur,” in Friedrich Barbarossa. Handlungsspielräume und Wirkungsweisen des stauﬁschen Kaisers, ed. A. Haverkamp, Vorträge und Forschungen 40 (Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 623– 50 and P. Johanek, “Kultur und Bildung im Umkreis Friedrich Barbarossas,” in ibid., 651–77. 32 Gesta Frederici 3,12, p. 414. 33 See above, p. 117. 34 “suggestione perversi hominis zizania seminantis” Gesta Frederici 3, 11, p. 414. Cf. Matthew 13:25. 31

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mediated between the Roman clergy and the German laity, between the learned and the vernacular languages. Imposing his own interpretation on the word beneﬁcia, the ambiguity of which he certainly understood, he resisted the pretensions of Rome and defended the interests of the empire. When the Archpoet attributed to Reinald the mind of a Nestor and the voice of a Ulysses, when he described him as “simpler than a dove and more cunning than a serpent,” when he praised the ability of his patron to resist deception, he was not employing the empty clichés of a court encomiast. He was evoking the calculated equivocality of this ecclesiastical politician. It is sometimes forgotten, by the many admirers of the Archpoet’s verse, that it was composed for a prelate no less subtle than himself. Reinald’s manipulation of language, his love of polyvalence and paradox, his zest for a joke were not forgotten by his enemies. Some of them were inclined to share Adrian IV’s view that he was an agent of the devil. Caput scismatis was John of Salisbury’s preferred expression for the archbishopelect of Cologne; and his animosity reached its climax in a letter to Gerard Pucelle, teaching there in 1166.35 Fomenter of schism and despiser of the church, Reinald, “greatest among the locusts of the beast,” had “power in his tongue and in his tail” (Revelations 9:3; 10:19).36 He displayed it by calling King Louis VII of France a regulus.37 With the condescension of an imperial minister, Reinald had meant to dismiss Barbarossa’s brother sovereign as a “kinglet.” But, with Ulysses’ cunning in his choice of words, he had again selected a term that was ambiguous, with connotations of serpent and (by extension) devil. This John of Salisbury dismissed as “shameless scurrility with words” (impudenti scurrilitate verborum). The accusation was not merely one of verbal impropriety: Reinald’s misdeeds, linguistic and political, were, in John’s opinion, tearing Christendom apart. And to convey his horror, he likened this controversial bishop to a buffoon or a jester (scurra), impudently playing with language. Is there a better description of the Archpoet’s art than impudens scurrilitas verborum? This evidence from Reinald’s opponents converges with the testimony of his allies. In 1156–57 Otto of Freising, after the dedication of his Chronicle to the emperor, added a letter to his counsellor, whom he addressed as a trained philosopher.38 Reinald knew the two guiding princi35 John of Salisbury, Letters 2, ep. 226, pp. 396 – 97; ep. 250, pp. 504 –7; ep. 277, pp. 592–93. 36 See S. Kuttner and E. Rathbone, “Anglo-Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century,” Traditio 7 (1949 – 50), pp. 279 – 358; and J. Fried, “Gerard Pucelle und Köln,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 68 (1982), pp. 125 – 35. 37 Ep. 186 in Letters 2, p. 228. 38 Chronik der Geschichte der zwei Staaten, ed. W. Lammers, trans. A. Schmidt (Darmstadt, 1990), pp. 11–15.

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ples of scholarship: a capacity to discard and an ability to choose. Reminding him of the rules of investigation shared by all the disciplines, Otto evoked their common background in the Parisian schools. That education had not been given to Barbarossa. He needed a bonus interpres. And since there was a danger that he might misapprehend Otto’s critical account of some of his ancestors, the historian relied on Reinald’s “discernment not to interpret unfavorably [what he had written] in the hearing of the emperor.”39 Shortly before the Diet of Besançon, the emperor’s uncle foresaw a peril of which the papal legates would presently fall foul. The chief intermediary between Barbarossa and the highest agents of clerical culture, both on the imperial side and against it, was Reinald of Dassel. How the emperor received their messages or their writings depended on the view which this interpres took of them. With the adjective bonus, Otto was not characterizing Reinald’s competence as a Latinist or a man of learning. What the historian sought to inﬂuence was the good will of his future interpreter. Reinald’s perception of a document composed in the learned language was the determining factor in its success or failure; and no one who knew him, at ﬁrst hand like Otto of Freising or at a distance like John of Salisbury, underestimated the cunning of this serpent feigning the simplicity of a dove. Calliditas found expression in circumventio —the machinations, the underhand stratagems that John attributed to “the schismatic of Cologne.” In his letter of 1166 to Gerard Pucelle, which describes Reinald in these terms, the circumventio practiced by the archbishop is compared with the fear (metus) inspired by the emperor.40 As a counterweight to both, “a true philosopher” like Gerard, imported from the schools of Paris, was to recall the German deviants to the true path. Truth, in this context, meant vera philosophia,41 which John deﬁned in terms of Roman orthodoxy. Just as “the schismatic of Cologne” represented the opposite of this ideal, so the imperial archbishop and his master were “two tails of smouldering ﬁrebrands.”42 Otto of Freising, employing the same criteria, had drawn the opposite conclusion. A dialectic between the sacred and the profane was integral to the public image of Reinald of Dassel. He was perceived both as a worldly magnate and an ecclesiastical prelate, as a thinker or a schemer, as a champion of the German church and an apostate from Rome. Against Rome its opponent turned its own weapons, not only by the creation of antipopes. Returning to Cologne after Barbarossa’s Italian campaign in July 1164, the archbishop-elect brought with him from Milan the 39 “Non indignetur vestra discretio nec sinistre . . . imperialibus auribus interpretetur.” Ibid., p. 8,5–6. 40 Ep. 158 in Letters 2, p. 70. 41 See above, p. 5. 42 Ep. 186 in Letters 2, p. 228.

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relics of the three Magi that the emperor had presented to him.43 They made the city of which he was metropolitan into one of the most important places of pilgrimage in Western Europe. Even Reinald’s harshest critic, John of Salisbury, plagued Gerard Pucelle with requests for a fragment of the coveted relics.44 And if the Magi served Reinald’s local purposes, even more useful to his wider designs was the Charlemagne, celebrated in Barbarossa’s privilegia as a model of the Christian prince, who, on December 29, 1165, was declared a saint.45 Reinald was probably aware of Abelard’s dispute about the identity of Saint Denis and of the demands, increasingly loud during the course of the twelfth century, for a critical assessment of genuine and false sanctity.46 Naïveté did not motivate his action, nor did scruples hinder him. The enhancement of his diocese’s importance by a forged charter for the Marienkirche in Aachen, the appropriation of the “German” Charlemagne from the rival claims of the French, and the creation of a “political saint” as a counterpoint to Edward the Confessor, canonized in 1161, all contributed to Reinald’s central aim: the sacralization of the imperium.47 And this was effected in the same year during which, on a springtime embassy to the English king, the “arch-schismatic” had been refused the kiss of greeting by the royal counselor, Count Robert of Leicester, and had been told that Henry II’s mother, the “Empress” Mathilda, was unwilling to receive him, because she could not risk incurring the disapproval of her episcopate. “Who has subjected the universal church to the judgment of one particular church?” John of Salisbury had thundered in 1160. “Who has appointed the Germans judges of the nations? Who has given authority to these headstrong brutes that they should set up a prince of their own choosing over the heads of men?”48 One of Reinald’s answers to those 43 For context, see H. Hofmann, Die Heiligen Drei Könige. Zur Heiligenverehrung im kirchlichen, gesellschaftlichen und politischen Leben des Mittelalters, Rheinisches Archiv 94 (Bonn, 1976) and R. Trexler, The Cult of the Magi (Princeton, 1997). 44 Ep. 158 in Letters 2, p. 70. 45 Cf. R. Folz, Le Souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’ empire germanique médiéval (Paris, 1950), pp. 204ff. and E. Meuthen, “Karl der Grosse-Barbarossa-Aachen. Zur Interpretation des Karlsprivilegs für Aachen,” in Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk und Nachleben, 4: Das Nachleben, ed. W. Braunfels and P. Schramm (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 54 –76. 46 See K. Schreiner, “‘Discrimen veri et falsi.’ Ansätze und Formen der Kritik in der Heiligen-und Reliquienverehrung des Mittelalters,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 48 (1966), pp. 1– 53 and Chenu, Théologie, pp. 29ff. 47 Cf. R. Folz, “La Chancellerie de Frédéric et la canonisation de Charlemagne,” Le Moyen Age 6 (1964), pp. 13– 31. 48 “Universalem ecclesiam quis particularis ecclesiae subiecit iudicio? Quis Teutonicos constituit iudices nationum? Quis hanc brutis et impetuosis hominibus auctoritatem contulit, ut pro arbitrio principem statuant super capita ﬁliorum hominum?” Ep. 124 in Letters 1, p. 206 with J. Reuter, “John of Salisbury and the Germans,” in World of John of Salisbury, pp. 415–25 and J. Petersohn, “Friedrich Barbarossa und Rom,” in Friedrich Barbarossa, ed.

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questions was delivered, ﬁve years later, with the canonization of Charlemagne. From a position both of strength and of weakness, he set out to demonstrate that the schismatic could determine sanctity and that the secular could be perceived as holy. Making a saint of a “German” emperor and two antipopes in the crisis of schism, Barbarossa’s minister implemented a policy that could be understood as inversion of models, or norms, which he derived from Rome. Papal imperialism, linked to the movements of religious reform, was the target of Reinald’s strategy; and the audacity with which he opposed it on the international stage was buttressed and balanced by a conservatism he drew from indigenous traditions. Parti-colored cloaks were emblematic of anti-ascetic tendencies shared by this worldly prelate with parts of the German clergy.49 Hostile to attempts to regulate ecclesiastical clothing; tolerant of eating, drinking, and sleeping; sympathetic to the qualities of laymen, virtuous or heroic, they did not hesitate to manipulate the biblical authorities that their puritan opponents cited against them. Among the higher echelons of the church of which Reinald was a leader, there were not only the “brutish barbarians” against whom John of Salisbury imprecated. Indulgence, urbanity, and savoir faire, reﬂected in Reinald’s correspondence with Wibald of Stablo, set them apart from reformers within and beyond the bounds of the empire. More accommodating to secular culture than some of his contemporaries, a clerical magnate like Reinald of Dassel also had to contend with laymen on their own terms. Those terms were, on occasion, military. As archbishop-elect of Cologne, Reinald was compelled to mobilize forces to resist the incursions of Count-palatine Conrad of Staufen.50 Conrad was none other than the emperor’s brother, and armed conﬂict with him was avoided only at high ﬁnancial cost. Attempts were made to settle the dispute at the Reichstag of Bamberg on November 18, 1164, and again at Würzburg, but antagonism lingered throughout the period to which the Archpoet’s work is datable. His patron was a prince of the German church who was not only bound in a tight symbiosis with the princes of the Reich but also constrained, as a matter of duty and of rights, to behave like them. When Rupert of Deutz,

Haverkamp, pp. 129 – 46, esp. 136ff. Cf. H. Fuhrmann, “Quis Teutonicos constituit iudices nationam? The Trouble with Henry,” Speculum 69 (1994), pp. 344 – 58. 49 Cf. B. Schmeidler, “Anti-asketische Äusserungen aus Deutschland im 11. und beginnenden 12. Jahrhundert,” in Kultur- und Universalgeschichte. Festschrift W. Götz (Leipzig, 1979), pp. 35–52. 50 See B. Brinken, Die Politik Konrads von Staufen in der Tradition der Rheinischen Pfalzgrafschaft, Rheinisches Archiv 92 (Bonn, 1974), pp. 167– 99.

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whose writings were still inﬂuential at Cologne during Reinald’s tenure of ofﬁce, condemned the priests, monks, and canons who maintained contacts with laymen as magistri libidinum,51 he was speaking, in the same diocese, from a different world: the world of the cloister—austere, ascetic, and stable—which cultivated a separation between the laity and the clergy and practiced a vita contemplativa that was the polar opposite of Reinald’s agitated activism. Imagine him, among the imperial troops, as on July 29, 1167, they stormed Saint Peter’s at Rome. Fire had been laid to the church of Santa Maria in Turri, which reached the bronze doors of the basilica. The forces of Alexander III surrendered. The following day, the antipope Pascal III was enthroned and Barbarossa, together with his empress, was crowned. No sooner were Reinald’s ambitions achieved than he succumbed to the plague that devastated Frederick’s army. Honor imperii, declared his master in what amounted to an epitaph. It was simpler to sum up Reinald’s character and achievements after his death than to write for him during his lifetime. Intellectual and shrewd, complex and mercurial, the arch-chancellor, archbishop, and arch-schismatic required, and deserved, an Archpoet. What author in quest of Reinald of Dassel’s favor would have been so naíve as to offer him a standard panegyric? How could the conventional categories of encomium be adapted to this extraordinary Proteus? His position, in the empire and in the church, was both secure and contested; his role, as architect of imperial strategy and as archbishop-elect of Cologne, was ambiguous; and his tastes were too sophisticated, his intelligence too acute, his humor too wry to permit a poet to rehearse familiar clichés of praise. Reinald demanded novelty from those who sought to win his favor by literary means; and if the Archpoet mimicked, in his own pseudonym, the titles of his patron,52 that implied a capacity, on the part of the archbishopelect, to accept, from his client, a measure of that scurrilitas that his critics deplored in himself. No number of allusions to Horace could make Reinald of Dassel into a mere Maecenas.53 He was both more and less. Less, in the sense that his 51 M. Bernards, “Die Welt der Laien in der kölnischen Theologie des 12. Jahrhunderts. Beobachtungen zur Ecclesiologie Ruperts von Deutz,” in Die Kirche und ihre Ämte und Stände. Festgabe J. Kardinal Frings (Cologne, 1960), pp. 391– 416. On contacts between Deutz and Cologne, see U. Lewald, “Zum Verhältnis von Köln und Deutz im Mittelalter,” in Die Stadt in der europäischen Geschichte. Festschrift E. Ennen, ed. W. Besch (Bonn, 1972), pp. 378–90. On the diffusion of Rupert’s works, see R. Haacke, “Die Überlieferung der Schriften Ruperts von Deutz,” DA 16 (1960), pp. 397– 436 and id., “Nachlese zur Überlieferung Ruperts von Deutz,” DA 26 (1970), pp. 528 – 40. 52 Gedichte, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, p. 19 and A. G. Rigg, “Golias and Other Pseudonyms,” SM 3 ser. 18 (1977), pp. 65 –109. 53 Pace S. Harrison, “Archpoet, Poem IV and Some Horatian Intertexts,” MlJb 32 (1997), pp. 37–42.

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failure to provide sustenance adequate to the Archpoet’s needs is constantly emphasized and more, in that Barbarossa’s counsellor is presented as the brains behind the imperial enterprise. “Splendor of the church, like the sun in heaven,” Reinald “illuminates the mind of Emperor Frederick”;54 the walls of Milan (leveled after the city’s capitulation on 28 May 116255) would still be standing, were it not for his intervention; Barbarossa’s victories were due to his socius.56 More than a companion of the emperor, Reinald is depicted as his partner in power by the Archpoet. Military action and political planning were determined by this towering ﬁgure, to whom justice could be done only by a discerning encomiast: cum sis maior omnibus, nullo minor crederis, (7,3,3)

“Greater than all,” in the Archpoet’s estimation, the arch-chancellor is perceived as “second to none” by others. None, by deﬁnition, included the emperor. What the illiteratus Barbarossa lacked, his socius possessed: equal competence in humane artes and divine littere.57 Instigator of the policies that his sovereign implemented, Reinald of Dassel, “believed” by others to be nullo minor, was recognized by his panegyrist as maior omnibus. The subjunctive (sis) marked a telling difference from the indicative (crederis). Distinguishing between the measure of his patron’s actual and acknowledged greatness, the Archpoet emphasized his own insight. Directly attributing to Reinald of Dassel qualities that he obliquely claims for himself (Ulixe facundior . . . / columba simplicior . . . / serpente callidior . . . ), this image-maker drew attention to the reciprocity of their relations. “A cheerful donor of patronage” (dator hilaris), Reinald understood that the Archpoet’s willingness to sing his praises derived from his own generosity (7,2,1–3) in the same spirit of do, ut des in which he had written to Wibald of Stablo.58 Yet reminders were necessary. “More openhanded than Saint Martin, you give what is justly requested” (7,6,3). Or perhaps not, for the client stood barefoot before his patron (7,9,2). Destitute on All Saints Day of 1164, the impoverished author amid the throngs of splendidly dressed worshipers offered a spectacle that was heart-rending. So heart-rending, that his plea invites its recipient to laugh. Had the Archpoet not composed a well-wrought panegyric in rhythmical verse? Did he not deserve a mantle and a tunic (7,11)? Was it not just to expect that his “nudity should touch the heart of the arch-chancellor”? archicancellarium vatis pulset nuditas (7,10,3) 54

Carm., ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, p. 66,1,3; 2,1–2. Herkenrath, Reinald von Dassel, pp. 185 – 86. 56 Carm., ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, p. 67,8,1– 3. 57 See above, p. 193. 58 See above, p. 194. 55

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How are we to interpret this demand? More signiﬁcantly, how was it intended to be understood by that bonus interpres, Reinald of Dassel? Was he meant to think of the poetic tradition of the Mantelgedicht and regard the Archpoet’s request as a sartorial metaphor of existential need? Perhaps, although tunics and mantles had a more precise signiﬁcance for Reinald, who had his own reasons for feeling the pressure applied to him by this attribution of Saint Martin’s generosity. Before the patron stood his client, clad only in his ﬁgurative nakedness. Nuditas was a formula of twelfth-century spirituality, on which the vates played shrewdly. Rather than following the naked Christ,59 he had attached himself to the entourage of an imperfect surrogate for Martin. There he had been unwillingly reduced to the poverty that the spirituales embraced by choice. With sancta paupertas, key term in the ideology of the reformers,60 he wanted no truck. Nor did Reinald. It was therefore only consequent that the archbishop-elect of Cologne should follow the example of his saintly predecessor, Heribert, and deliver the goods.61 Not for nothing, in the course of the poem, had praise of Reinald’s inﬂuence and intelligence been mingled with references to his largitas. The one quality complemented the others in the classic image of an ideal prince. This prince of the church should grasp that the plenitude of his power could not be extolled until it was realized in the act of giving. While his encomiast remained “naked,” his potential remained unfulﬁlled. Emphasizing their mutual dependence with an inversion of religious imagery tailored to his patron’s anti-ascetic tastes, the Archpoet, needy but importunate, invites him to give with a smile (dator hilaris). The aim was complicity—but of a different kind and quality from the one John of Salisbury sought with Thomas Becket. Similar in their irreverence, compatible in their irony, and equals in their culture, Reinald of 59 See G. Constable, “Nudus nudum Christum sequi and Parallel Formulas in the Twelfth Century,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History. Essays Presented to G. Huntston Williams, ed. F. Church (Leyden, 1979), pp. 83– 91 and J. Châtillon, “Nudum Christum nudus sequere. Note sur les origines et la signiﬁcation du thème de la nudité spirituelle dans les écrits de Saint Bonaventure,” in S. Bonaventura, 1274 –1974, 4: Theologica (Grottoferrata, 1974), pp. 719–72. 60 On the theme in the ideology of the reformers, see K. Bosl, Armut Christi. Ideale der Mönche und Ketzer. Ideologie der aufsteigenden Gesellschaftsschichten vom 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse. Sitzungsberichte (Munich, 1981); M. Arduini, “Biblische Kategorien und Mittelalterliche Gesellschaft: Potens und Pauper bei Rupert von Deutz und Hildegard von Bingen (xi bzw. xii Jh.),” in Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverständnis des Mittelalters, ed. A. Zimmermann, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 12/2 (Berlin, 1980), pp. 467– 97 and A. Lazzarino del Grosso, Società e potere nella Germania del xii secolo. Gerhoch di Reichersberg (Florence, 1974). 61 Rupert of Deutz, Vita Heriberti. Edition mit Kommentar und kritische Untersuchungen, ed. P. Dinter (Bonn, 1976), 24,4, p. 66. On the diffusion of the Life, see ibid., pp. 94ff.

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Dassel and the Archpoet are represented, in the works of this ambitious author, as intellectual allies. Mimicking the role of intimate and interpres which the adviser of the emperor played with Frederick, the client portrays himself as a companion for Barbarossa’s socius—naturally with deference. Inferior in the hierarchy, poor where Reinald is rich, dissolute where he is virtuous, the Archpoet represents the other side of the coin on which he stamps his own image of the archbishop-elect. Hence the emphasis, recurrent throughout the corpus of his verse, on himself as an alternative to twelfth-century stereotypes of the cleric, the dependant, and the author. A “non-panegyrist,” the Archpoet expends much effort in offering reasons why he cannot compose the encomia that are the occasion, or the pretext, of his writing: . . .non est in me forsitan id quod de me sentis. Audi preces, domine. . . . . .onus impositum ferre non valentis, quod probare potero multis argumentis. (4,1,4;2,1,3–4)62

For other poets, it was enough to state their inability or reluctance to undertake the task for which they had been commissioned. Not so for this arch-sophist. His “argument” requires multiple “proofs,” because what he wishes to construct is a literary dialectic on the model of Sic et non. Addressed to a former provost of Hildesheim trained in the schools of Paris, that dialectic was pointed and actual. When the Archpoet claimed that the task of writing about the exploits of Barbarossa in Italy would surpass the talents of a Virgil or a Lucan (4,4–5), or when he contrasted the abstemiousness, diligence, and withdrawal from the world of other authors, his classical and biblical allusions were adapted, with polemical irony, to the circumstances in which client and patron found themselves. Drawing attention to the errors of his ways, he reckoned with a favorable hearing, because the rules he boasted of breaking were being imposed on the church by Reinald’s enemies. Neither of them had sympathy for the strictures of meddling monks. Describing his love for food and drink, making wine the source of his inspiration and sobriety the cause of his failure to write (4,12–14), the Archpoet inverted an ideal of rigor which Reinald of Dassel did not practice but with which he was well acquainted. It was the ideal of the monastic reformers whom the archbishop-elect, throughout his career, adamantly opposed: the goal of regulating, strictly and systematically, every aspect of religious life. Irregular in his habits, undisciplined in his conduct, the bibulous vates given to gluttony, sloth, and sleep represented himself as the opposite of a Rupert of Deutz or a Bernard of Clairvaux. Didactic and 62

Carm., ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, p. 57.

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domineering, both of them had delivered their admonitions in a prescriptive rhetoric. Prescriptions are replaced by epigrams in the Archpoet’s pithy style. Each had a resonance at the level of ecclesiastical politics—both local, in the Cologne that had experienced (or endured), across the river, Rupert’s interminable moralism, and international, in the European context of the Cistercian movement dominated, until recently, by Bernard. When, for example, the Archpoet declared: Via lata gradior more iuventutis, implico me viciis immemor virtutis, voluptatis avidus magis quam salutis mortuus in anima curam gero cutis. (10,5) I tread the primrose path as young men do, enmeshed in vice, forgetting virtue, keener on pleasure than on salvation, dead in the soul, I take care of my skin.

he was joyfully accepting, by his addiction to vice, the fate decreed for those who failed to satisfy the virtuous criteria of cura corporis central to the reformers’ program.63 When, celebrating his drunkenness in terms they condemned, the Archpoet added: michi sapit dulcius vinum de taberna quam quod aquam miscuit presulis pincerna. (10,13,3–4) wine from the pub tastes sweeter to me than what the bishop’s steward mixes with water

he was not only drawing sarcastic attention to the underhand practices of Reinald’s servants, but also alluding to a provision, common to several orders, about the drinking of vinum mixtum on days of fasting.64 No day was observed as a fast by this unreformed cleric; his deprivations were never voluntary, his poverty always unwelcome. Afﬁrming: fodere non debeo, quia sum scolaris ortus ex militibus proeliandi gnaris. (4,18,1–2) I ought not to dig, for I am a scholar, the scion of knights, expert battlers

the Archpoet both advertised his origins among the class of ministeriales and trumpeted his disdain for the manual labor that formed an essential part of the Cistercian rule65 —music to the ears of the traditionalist 63 On the subject see G. Zimmermann, Ordensleben und Lebensstandard. Die cura corporis in den Ordensvorschriften des abendländischen Hochmittelalters, Beiträge zur Geschichte des alten Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens 32 (Münster, 1973). 64 Ibid., pp. 44 and 68. 65 Ibid., pp. 152– 53.

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Reinald, critic of the zealots’ innovations. Describing his own failings in categories he knew were neither shared nor approved by his patron, this wily client transformed self-denunciation into self-commendation. Hence the humor of his plea to the archbishop-elect at 4,6,4: “Temper your rigor.” The Archpoet was well aware that indulgence was to be expected from this opponent of the rigorists. Acting the reprobate, he could anticipate complicity; and this lends his writing its air of calculated audacity. More boldly than those who mocked the Cistercians as syllabarum discussores—pedantic quibblers in their interpretation of the Benedictine rule66 —he celebrates as essential to his vocation as vates all that the purists and puritans criticized as superﬂuous, worthless, vicious. Urbane where the reformers were rustic, forgiving where they were severe, witty where they were solemn, Reinald of Dassel and the Archpoet were united in a dialectical opposition to the Roman enemies of Barbarossa’s imperium and their ecclesiastical allies. That separateness, reinforced by a nexus of mutual dependence, was strengthened by intellectual bonds. Unsuited to being a knight, unwilling to become a beggar, and refusing to thieve (4,18 –19), the Archpoet, reliant on Reinald, appealed, as scolaris and vates, to their common culture: Sepe de miseria mee paupertatis conqueror in carmine viris litteratis. Laici non sapiunt ea, que sunt vatis. (4,20,1–3) Often I complain in my poetry to men of letters about my miserable poverty. Laymen do not understand the poet’s work.

Within the conﬁnes of a clergy able to read, excluding a laity capable only of listening,67 the Archpoet composes for the members of an elite. His art is designed for insiders, privileged by access to higher learning, which he regularly links with a largitas that neither the laity nor the “prelates of Italy” display (4,20,4; 22). Generosity, for Reinald of Dassel’s servant, is German: A viris Teutonicis multa solent dari digni sunt pre ceteris laude singulari. (4,21) The Germans, accustomed to being openhanded, deserve exceptional praise above all others.

Nationality, culture, and openhandedness form a paradigm, closed to those outside Reinald’s entourage. Within it, one may be scurrilous but not 66

Ibid., p. 204. See H. Grundmann, “Litteratus—illiteratus” and Y. Congar, “Clercs et laïcs au point de vue de la culture au Moyen Age: “laicus” ⫽ “sans lettres,” in id., Études d’ ecclésiologie médiévale, pp. 309– 32. 67

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stupid or frivolous. Beyond the favored circle, the Archpoet relegates prelates who support leccatores and mimi, parasites and buffoons, “who know nothing except how to rave” (4,23 –25)—an apotropaic gesture, intended to ward off rivals with whom he might be confused. Sane but inspired, erudite yet no pedant, the client-author disclaims the negative side of his own image, while warning Reinald not to encourage court jesters or tolerate lickspittles at the tables of the great. And this licenses the Archpoet to assume the part of the mock-moralist, preaching against vice. Avarice is tantamount to idolatry (4,26,2 and 4,22,1); tightﬁstedness equivalent to hypocrisy; until, after developing a case against these vicia argued by Rupert of Deutz,68 he concludes, with the logic of inverted altruism, that true religion and sincere piety consist in the act of giving. Take the example of Reinald, whose charity ﬁnds its counterpoint in the openhandedness of himself (4, 30 –31). Portraying himself as a donor of patronage, its recipient extols the virtue of largitas; and as the wit condemns the buffoon, the client deplores the parasite, and the German sneers at the Italians, a dialectic of contradiction emerges, the aim of which is to cast this scurra as an alternative type of sage. Against the revived tradition that equated asceticism with wisdom and identiﬁed philosophy with the vita contemplativa,69 the apologist of indulgence twists, in his own interest, each and every one of the “philosopher’s” clichés. If he drinks, brawls, and womanizes, the reason is that he lacks solitary and secret vices. If he is a spendthrift, he has the right to criticize stinginess, because he practices charity. And if he styles himself a fool, woe betide those boneheads who wish to censure him. . . . All depends on the perspective from which moral failings are judged. Pre-empting that of the moralists, the Archpoet denounces himself. Transforming into virtues the sins which, a handful of strophes earlier in his poem, had served to distinguish him from the diligent bores among his competitors (4,10 –12), he establishes his uniqueness with a casuistry that is compelling: et non sum qui curias intrem imprudenter. and I am not one to enter the court imprudently. (4,32,3)

That declaration may be believed without reserve. Disarming his critics, he assumes their role, claiming for himself a monopoly to speak, in the name and the spirit of Reinald of Dassel, with the “mind of Nestor” and the “voice of Ulysses.” The arch-chancellor had requested a panegyric on Barbarossa and received, from the Archpoet, an autobiography. Autobiographical not in the sense 68

Cf. J. van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, (Berkeley, 1983), p. 273. Cf. E. Kantorowicz, “Die Wiederkehr gelehrter Anachorese im Mittelalter,” in his Selected Studies (New York, 1965), pp. 339 – 51. 69

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of self-relevation but in that of self-concealment, the client evades his patron’s commission. So too in the so-called Kaiserhymnus, Salve mundi domine! 70 where the point of the panegyric consists in what it does not say. A dutiful Christian, the author declines to invoke the Muses or the pagan deities (9,7). Pavia, where he ﬁnds himself, would deserve a long encomium, had the convention of brevity not excluded it (9,18). Whatever he might afﬁrm about Barbarossa would be unequal to the emperor’s grandeur (9,14,4), for his power and fame are so obvious to all, that there is no need to express them (9,16,2). Were the Archpoet free to laud the achievements of his hero, his writing would surpass the Aeneid (9,26,4). In the realm of hypothesis, this “nonencomiast” is a master. The epic he has not delivered excels the major works of Latin verse. Topoi, we are told. In the hands of the Archpoet, they are exposed as empty clichés. Emptiness, however, is ﬁlled by him with implicit meaning. What he offers Barbarossa is a narrative poem that must be extrapolated from between the lines of a lyric. Evasiveness is justiﬁed by pretending to follow the rules: brevity, formality, concordance of theme with style. And because the subject is sublime, the ineffable can be presented as the potential. What he is about to write—what is reconstructible from the outlines of his grand plan—so dwarfs punctual praise of the emperor that is better left unstated. No, it is not that the Archpoet has shirked Reinald of Dassel’s commission. He has fulﬁlled it by enacting a masquerade. To call this joke “political poetry”—to link it with the Ludus de Antichristo or the Ligurinus by Gunther of Pairis—is to effect a confusion of categories.71 The mundus domini of the Archpoet’s “Kaiserhymnus” does not even dispose of an obedient servant. Declaring his obedience to the will of Emperor Frederick, the author asserts his own with equal imperiousness—he and his patron ﬁgure, with unabashed prominence, in the penultimate strophe (9,33)—an inseparable duo linked by bonds of mutual interest. So much for the panegyrical convention of self-effacement. So much for the genre itself. Ringing the changes on the theme of the Roman empire and its reviver was too simple a task for this sophist, whose paean of incomplete praise announced a poet as unwilling to write about the exploits of the new Augustus as the clients of his namesake.72 Declining to plod in the pedestrian tracks of encomium, the Archpoet soars into heaven. There the reluctant panegyrist becomes an inspired seer. A 70

Watenphul-Krefeld, pp. 68 –72 (no. 9). K. Langosch, Politische Dichtung um Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa (Berlin, 1943), pp. 52ff. and cf. G. Günther, ed., Der Antichrist. Ein mittelalterliches Drama (Hamburg, 1970), pp. 54–55. 72 Cf. J. Grifﬁn, “Augustus and the Poets: ‘Caesar qui cogere posset,’” in Caesar Augustus. Seven Aspects, ed. F. Millar and E. Segal (Oxford, 1984), pp. 189 –218. 71

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vates incapable of prophecy unless ﬁlled with food and wine (4,15), he now resumes his preferred activity in a different setting: the other world, his entry into which he describes in exceptional detail.73 Between a Saturday and a Sunday, at the moment of daybreak, neither lying in bed nor standing on his feet, he was “ravished” into “a second sphere” (5,4,2). As the mundane gives way to the extraordinary, the profane is secluded from the sacred. The pious poet begins by crossing his brow, forehead, and breast (5,1,3); his account of paradise is studded with allusions to the Bible; Aristotle and Homer are absent from “the house of God” as visualized by him.74 What rigorist could object to this orthodox vision of the celestial realms? The clichés listed in elegant order, the Archpoet addresses his patron. Reinald is not to expect any reference to the intellectual pursuits that he had followed since his studies in Paris. Of course the vates was not trained in the schools; he had learned about philosophical topics of scholastic debate by sitting at Saint Augustine’s feet; and the authority from which he derived his message about the future was impenetrable to the human intellect.75 Rehearsing standard objections made by the spirituales to secular learning, the Archpoet apes their “holier than thou” attitude, in order to spring his surprise. For the “secret counsels of heaven” which he pretends to reveal, his source was the Archangel Michael (7,8 –9), and the subject of the disclosures was, predictably, Reinald himself: Tu vero ne timeas, presul, sed exulta. Have no fear, archbishop, but be glad. (5,9,4)

Not as a humble panegyrist mouthing platitudes at the feet of the emperor but as a seer, a privileged intermediary between heaven and earth, the client addresses his patron. And what he vouchsafes to Reinald is the message of his guardian angel, whose concern is expressed in prayers and tears (5, 10ff.). The archbishop-elect should not be haughty; even if success crowns his undertakings, no one is perfect; and the servant does not wish to ﬂatter his master (5,13,1–2). Saint Martin is angry with the erring prelate, and only his faithful follower’s intervention had prevented a complaint to God (5,14,20), for their roles are reversed. The protégé styles himself the protector in the interests of Saint Martin’s at Cologne—a monastery where, on his own account (5,19,2; 25), he had enjoyed a hospitality sufﬁcient to his bibulous needs. Descending from heaven to earth, from irony to politics, the Archpoet alludes to Reinald’s dispute with Count-palatine Conrad.76 That odious tyrant was responsible 73

Carm. 5, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, pp. 62– 64. See above, p. 193. 75 “de futuris multa / que sunt intellectibus hominum sepulta.” 5,9,1–2. 76 5,19,22–24, and see Brinken, Die Politik Konrads von Staufen, pp. 182ff. (with a summary of the older literature). 74

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for an increase in the price of wine and, unless he liberated the vineyards he had occupied, he is menaced with the torments described in the book of Apocalypse (5,24). Imprecations threatened against his enemy, the archbishop-elect of Cologne is reminded of his duties at home. In the period from July 1164 to the end of 1166—the longest of Reinald of Dassel’s two interrupted stays in the city of which he was metropolitan— notarial activity by the scholaris who has been identiﬁed with the Archpoet is attested.77 When he wrote: Quamvis incessabilis sarcina curarum mentem tuam distrahat nec fatiget parum, scire tamen opus est quid sit Deo carum: iuvare viriliter res ecclesiarum (5,18) Although your mind is distracted and mightily fatigued by the burden of unceasing cares, you should be aware of what pleases God: manfully lending support to the ecclesiastical cause,

he was familiar with the res ecclesiarum of Cologne. Its interests compromised by a secular magnate, the church looked to its leader for succor. And Reinald, prepared to contest with force the depredations of Count Conrad, was regulating, in a series of charters, the affairs of his diocese at the time when his notary appealed to him to intervene on behalf of Saint Martin’s.78 From there the bureaucrat transformed into a visionary lodges his protest about the wine prices. If the celestial relevation lent weight to the terrestrial request, a sojourn among the monks also had useful effects. Sent by Reinald to the cloister, his servant had learned the meaning of the term “good shepherd”: Interim me dominus iuxta psalmum David regit et in pascue claustro collocavit; hic mihi, non aliis vinum habundavit: abbas bonus pastor est et me bene pavit (5,25). In the meantime my lord, according to David’s psalm, rules me and placed me in the pastures of the cloister. Here there is wine in abundance for me, not others: the abbot is a good shepherd and feeds me well.

Whether meant as a diplomatic mission undertaken by the archbishopelect’s ofﬁcial on the orders of his master or as a disciplinary measure imposed on a disorderly notarius, the Archpoet’s stay in the monastery enabled him to contrast the idealized pastor of Saint Martin’s, who had 77 See R. Herkenrath, “Studien zum Magistertitel in der frühen Stauferzeit,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 88 (1980), pp. 3– 35, esp. 28ff. 78 See Herkenrath, Reinald von Dassel, pp. 157ff.

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satisﬁed the drinker’s needs, with the metropolitan of Cologne, from whom he demanded “a big present” on “this feast-day.” A feast of no fools was offered by the Archpoet on 11 November, 1164. Speaking in the interests of the monastery, he energetically stated his own. The circumstances, as usual, were terrible; he was ill and at death’s door (5,21–22)—where, however, he sustained a jollity at variance with his dire tone. Wine providing a criterion by which might be assessed the goodness of an ecclesiastical shepherd and the evil of a lay magnate, even a problem of diocesan politics could be lent a festive air. And if the Archpoet’s image of boozing in the cloister was calculated to appeal to Reinald of Dassel, that adversary of Count Conrad ought not to content himself with the pleasures of a double Schadenfreude. Why should he, who could make Charlemagne into a saint, not favor this intimate of Saint Martin with a bottle? Res ecclesiarum were not only settled by charters. On Saint Martin’s Day of 1164, which the Archpoet took as the occasion for his poem, began the Reichstag of Roncaglia, which Reinald reached two weeks later. His presence is attested by charters, some of which he composed and wrote himself.79 They attest his inﬂuence on imperial policy, then at its height; and they display the arch-chancellor’s concern to sacralize, in formulaic and legal language, the chief objects of his policy: “sacrum imperium,” “sacratissimum propositum,” and “sancta Coloniensis ecclesia.”80 Sanctity was the last quality Reinald’s enemies would have ascribed to him in 1164. In the summer of the same year, he had been described, by Pope Alexander III, as “the cause and leader of chaos within the church.” The elect of Cologne should be seized on his passage from Italy through Burgundy, where he had attempted to win the support of the notables of this central part of the empire for his antipope. No act could be more pleasing to the see of Saint Peter,81 wrote Alexander to the archbishop of Reims. For Rome and the curia, the Archpoet’s patron was the “criminal, perﬁdious, and cruel teacher of schismatic error,” and Barbarossa was his duped pupil.82 79 See R. Herkenrath, “Reinald von Dassel als Verfasser und Schreiber von Kaiserurkunden,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 72 (1964), pp. 34 – 62. 80 Ibid., pp. 49, 53, 54, 55. 81 Cf. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa, p. 238. 82 “Quanta mala et quot incommoda per charissimum in Christo ﬁlium nostrum Henricum, illustrem Anglorum regem, Romanae Ecclesiae et nobis acciderint . . . ex eo manifeste percipitur, quod illi viro scelerato, perﬁdo, et crudeli et huius schismatis erroris magistro Reginaldo, quondam cancellario, communicans per suos, quos ad Fredericum dictum imperatorem transmisit, occasionem et materiam praestitit, quod idem Fredericus inductus est ad illud detestandum et profanum iuramentum, imo periurium faciendum.” Alexander III, May 16, 1166; PL 200, 417.

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About the personal piety of Emperor Frederick, amator ecclesiarum, there is no room for doubt.83 Nor is there reason to question Reinald of Dassel’s engagement for the see of Cologne84 and his awareness of the political dimension of holiness. In June 1164, just days before setting out for Burgundy, he had been presented with the relics of the Magi by his grateful master. With these incentives to the tourist trade and ornaments to his see’s prestige in tow, the archbishop-elect of Cologne entered Vienne, the Burgundian capital, where he was hailed as sanctus by the Archpoet.85 No term, at the moment it was used, could have been more provocative. No cleric attached to the chancery of Reinald of Dassel could have failed to understand that the archbishop-elect’s efforts to sacralize Frederick’s empire and his own see, like his canonization of Charlemagne, were actions that outraged Alexander III’s supporters, because they appropriated values to which the arbiters of Roman orthodoxy claimed exclusive rights. Defying them with bravura—arch, ironical, and insolent—Reinald was a grand seigneur, admired and detested for his ﬂair. Such a ﬁgure required something rather more subtle, from his court-poet, than the works of a “Latin propagandist” composed to “create within Vienne a [favorable] public attitude.”86 And what was this “public”? The assembled bishops of Burgundy and “the schoolman of the town” who, delighted by his local allusions and attracted by his command of biblical exegesis, would have understood the Archpoet’s work as an “encomium of Reinald” and an “appeal” to “return to their allegiance to him.” Is it possible, in short, to reduce so cosmopolitan an author to the level of a provincial panegyrist? Neither “the bishops assembled at Vienne” nor the putative “schoolmen” nor the illusory “public,” ﬂattered by a display of pedantry or tickled by local pride, is ever mentioned in this poem. The opening invocation of trumpets, heralds, and showmen is intended less to conjure up a “Herrscher-adventus”87 than to contrast familiar clichés88 of celebration with the solitary ﬁgure of the Archpoet. His head bowed, deprived of reason, sense, and speech, he observes the noisy antics of the istriones and balatrones, each of them hoping for a “big present” (2, 12). His own objective sought by others, this eloquent apologist of silence pours scorn on his 83 See F. Opll, “Amator ecclesiarum. Studien zur religiösen Haltung Friedrich Barbarossas,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsschreibung 88 (1980), pp. 70–93. 84 Das Bistum Köln von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts 1, ed. W. Neuss and F. Oediger (Cologne, 1964), pp. 224 – 30. 85 Carm. 2, 31, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, p. 54. Cf. F. Cairns, “The Archpoet’s ‘Jonah-Confession’ (Poem II). Literary, Exegetical and Historical Aspects,” MlJb 18 (1983), pp. 168– 93, esp. 191. 86 Ibid., p. 193 (my italics). 87 For bibliography see ibid., pp. 171ff. 88 Topoi, for Cairns, ibid., p. 173.

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rivals. Clowns, buffoons, and parasites, they are motivated by self-interest (cf. 4, 23, 25), unlike him. Withdrawn and contrite, he thinks only of his transgressions (reatus, v. 52 and cf. vv. 36 and 43). The situation imagined in this poem is the opposite of a public address with propagandistic intent. Juxtaposed with the worldly pomp and circumstance of the arch-chancellor’s entry into Vienne is the other, more muted, side of Reinald’s double persona: the sanctus or archbishop-elect whose holiness was so vehemently contested by his enemies. Deferring to his hierarchical superior, the Archpoet shuts out the tumult of the outside world, with its crowds of competitors and sycophants, to seek the undivided attention of the prelate in the intimacy of the confessional. With an act, or a parody, of the “canonical penance” established in the Latin West since the ninth century,89 he admits the error of his ways to his episcopus. Conﬁdentiality is guaranteed and anonymity feigned by the ﬁgura of Jonas, with its multiple associations of the sinner and the saved.90 Underlining the Archpoet’s distance from the laity, this technical term of exegesis recalled the clerical culture he shared with Reinald, in which the act that he was about to perform was hotly debated. At a time, before the fourth Lateran council, when the practice of penance was in crisis,91 the Archpoet draws on the distinction, reintroduced in the late eleventh century, between outward atonement and inner contrition.92 Careful in his observance of the form, he casts doubt on the content of his confession, thus rendering it null and void in canonical terms. And this was done on the conﬁdent assumption of Reinald’s indulgence—exactly that indulgentia which, in such circumstances, a confessor was not supposed to show. The rules broken and the sacrament ironized, penance became a form of provocation: tuus quondam adoptivus, sed pluralis genitivus nequam nimis et lascivus 89 C. Vogel, “La Discipline pénitentielle en Gaule des origines au ixe siècle. Le dossier hagiographique,” Revue des sciences religieuses 30 (1956), pp. 1–26, 157– 86. Cf. F. Russo, “Pénitence et excommunication. Étude historique sur les rapports entre la théologie et le droit canon dans le domaine pénitentielle du ixe au xiiie siécle,” Revue des sciences religieuses 33 (1946), pp. 257–79, 431– 61; and P. von Moos, “Occulta cordis. Contrôle de soi et confession au Moyen Age 2. Formes de la confession,” Médiévales 30 (1998), pp. 117– 37. 90 Cf. Cairns, “The Archpoet’s ‘Jonah-Confession,’” pp. 176ff. 91 J. Avril, “Remarques sur un aspect de la vie religieuse paroissiale: La Pratique de la confession et de la communion du xe au xive siècle,” in L’Encadrement religieux des ﬁdèles au Moyen Age et jusqu’au concile de Trent. La Paroisse—le clergé—la pastorale—la dévotion, Actes du 109e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Dijon, 1984, Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1985), pp. 347– 63, esp. 355 – 56. 92 See A. Murray, “Confession before 1215,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 ser., 3 (1993), pp. 51– 82, esp. 52– 53.

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mihi factus est nocivus. Voluptate volens frui conparabar brute sui nec cum sancto sanctus fui. (2, 25–31) [I was] once your adoptive son, but the genitive plural, excessively evil and lascivious, became my bane. Wanting to enjoy pleasure, I was like one of the beasts, nor was I holy with a holy man.

The language, here, is arresting—less because of the behavior it ascribes to the Archpoet than of the position it imputes to the “arch-schismatic”—a foster-father, in the sense of his favorite’s protector, as bishop Reinald is sanctus, with all doubts suppressed. Defying the controversy inherent in his patron’s public image, the Archpoet emphasizes his similarity to the electus Colonie by representing him as a wag. A wag familiar with the grammar of sex, he could be expected to understand the oblique Latin pluralis genitivus as an allusion to frequent intercourse.93 To how many other prelates of the Western church would a poet, in the year 1164, have confessed promiscuity with the expectation of being pardoned? The answer, among patrons of Latin letters in this period, is probably one. And why did the transgressor expect Reinald’s understanding on this sensitive issue? Because control of the sexual mores of the clergy was an aim of the reforming party in the church formed by his political and ecclesiastical opponents.94 It is not difﬁcult to imagine the archbishop-elect’s unholy mirth at the solemnity with which Alexander III pronounced that incest with one’s mother-in-law was a graver sin than simple adultery,95 or the ease with which Reinald might have cited other authorities who had taken a less stringent view. Had not Saint Augustine, in his hierarchy of sexual offenses, deﬁned fornication as the least serious?96 Regulation, not repression, of scandalous activities was the aim of many churchmen, particularly those like 93 See G. van Poppel, “Der ‘Genitivus’ bei den Vaganten,” Neophilologus 5 (1920), pp. 180–81 and J. Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex. The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). 94 See J. Brundage, “Carnal Delight: Canonistic Theories of Sexuality,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. S. Kuttner and K. Pennington, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Ser. C, Subsid. G (Vatican City, 1980), pp. 361– 85, esp. 369 – 71. Cf. P. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials. The Development of a Sexual Code 550 –1150 (Toronto, 1984), pp. 36ff. 95 Ibid., p. 373. 96 Ibid., p. 372.

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Reinald of Dassel alienated from the moralism of the reformers. In confessing his fault and submitting to authority, the Archpoet had removed the chief reatus. Or had he? Between poet and patron an analogy is drawn likening their relationship to that of God and Jonah (vv. 32–34). Caught out (deprehensum) in his misdeeds, the reprobate caused a storm [of anger] (rerum tempestatis orte, vv. 35–36). That expression ﬁnds its parallel and complement in one that follows: reus tibi vereor te miserturum mihi forte. (vv. 43–44) In my guilt toward you I fear that you may take pity on me.

Guilt deﬁned without reference to God, the Archpoet’s Jonas defers to Reinald’s will. His grace, unlike that of the severe creator imagined by puritans, is prompt and forgiving. And because the archbishop-elect, unlike the members of his entourage, is so lenient, this miscreant can afford to voice a doubt that is actually expressive of conﬁdence. If his accusers set themselves up as iudices, he can rely on the misericordia of their superior. Playing the role of moralists, the Archpoet’s detractors have got the wrong end of the stick. At what they frowned, Reinald could be relied on to laugh. So it is that, in the privileged sphere still occupied by the disgraced favorite, penance becomes a means of requesting patronage. Divine agency excluded from the inverted moral world of servant and master, the ultimate authority is the archbishop-elect of Cologne. To gain his ear and win his support, others must be eliminated. The whale that has swallowed this alternative Jonah (vv. 38, 47) is the beast of ill repute. A chorus of condemnation (v. 37) preceded the Archpoet’s disappearance, and only his patron’s command could release him from its “wide mouth” (vv. 53ff.). His transgressions (reatus) now forgiven by this savior of the world and model of generosity, he promises a chef d’oeuvre as the fulﬁllment of God’s plan (vv. 59–65). The language of redemption and salvation serves an irony that undermines the sequence of poetic and religious clichés. Reinald’s obedient retainer would follow his command to go among “the swords and arrows,” bearing the poet’s unmartial ivy; he would be fearless among the Ninevites (an anagram for the inhabitants of Vienne) and the “shameless peoples,” surpassing “the lives of the fathers” in his own and avoiding what Reinald shunned (vv. 70–74)—high-sounding promises, calculated to deliver little. With this set of comparisons between incompatibilities—war, conducted by the arch-chancellor but feared by his client (cf.4,18,3–4), or the austerity of a desert father, shunned by the opulent prelate—mock-contrition turns into a direct plea for money:

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poetrias inauditas scribam tibi, si me ditas. (vv. 74–75) I will write unheard—of poetry for you, if you make me rich.

Conﬁdent in his singularity, the Archpoet can now afford to speak openly (v. 76), the mask of allegory cast aside. Between the public sphere, dominated by critics, gossips, and fools, and the privacy of an inner circle, where he and Reinald join forces, he distinguishes, in order to answer the criticisms of his detractors. Recalling his sociability by promising to become an anchorite (vv. 89–90), suggesting that his lust, in temporary abeyance, might be curbed only by castration (vv. 91–92), he concludes his list of adynata in the words of Christ ( John 15:4), comparing himself to the branch and Reinald to the vine. With that biblical image, the Archpoet intended to evoke more than a common thirst for drink. His inseparability from his master is suggested by the ﬁgura used, in the commentary on the Gospel of Saint John by Rupert of Deutz, to describe the unity of the church. Sever the palmes and the vitis (the minister of the sacraments from the unitas ecclesiae), argued Rupert,97 and the result is schisma—precisely the situation in which Reinald of Dassel found himself when this poem was written. As the branch and the vine of an “alternative church,” the Archpoet and the archbishop-elect appear in a chiaroscuro of shifting perspectives between the profane and the sacred. Even an allusion to the most hallowed of texts can reveal itself as ironical and provocative; even the most solemn of sacraments can be cast as ambiguous. The appeal, implicit or stated, is to Reinald’s sense of humor rather than his spiritual status. He may forgive the Archpoet’s transgressions (reatus): he is not asked to pardon his sins (peccata). Conﬁdent that he is irresistible, the “penitent” pays his “confessor” the complement of attributing to him an equal intelligence, which others are implied not to possess. Nothing could be more misleading than to term this poem a “public” work of “propaganda.” Exclusion is of its essence. The wider world shut out, his critics confounded and his enemies silenced, the outrageous author makes Reinald of Dassel, his ideal reader, proud to be one. What of the others—the rivals in the archbishop’s entourage who picked faults with his character and writing? Described by him, metaphorically, as censors, these chancery-colleagues of the Archpoet exercised that function both literally and ofﬁcially. When Rahewin sent his continuation of Otto’s 97 Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Iohannis, ed. R. Haacke, CCCM 9 (Turnhout, 1969), p. 650, 1937ff.

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Gesta Frederici to the emperor’s cancellarius Ulrich and pronotarius Heinrich, he described them as the “arbiters” and “correctors” of his work. They were to judge what might be published and what should be excised.98 Using a legal term (edere) of considerable antiquity, Rahewin referred to imperial censura praevia.99 Requesting, in his prologue, these preceptores, testes, et iudices to “emend anything requiring correction according to the rule of truth,”100 he was acknowledging forms of control the Archpoet ﬂouted. If his writing was uncensurable by his critics, the reason was that he appealed directly to that bonus interpres, their master. Hence the liberties the Archpoet does not hesitate to take with historical facts and traditional rhetoric. Meant as provocations to the correctores, they raise the question of what measure of alertness to ﬁctive discourse a writer like him could expect from them. Within the imperial chancery presided over by Reinald of Dassel were composed ﬁctive letters between Barbarossa, Adrian IV, and Archbishop Hillin of Trier.101 Produced in the wake of the conﬂict over the interpretation of beneﬁcium at Besançon in 1157, they employ, in simpler terms, techniques that the Archpoet raised to a higher level. Ecce audistis blasphemiam! is the indignant comment attributed to the Emperor Frederick on the papal missive.102 The servant of God’s servants is repeatedly described as a blasphemous and insane schismatic; Rome, the “house of Peter,” had become a “den of thieves” and a “dwelling-place of demons.”103 The satirical style is reinforced by an array of biblical quotations, each of them manipulated in Barbarossa’s cause. The “pope’s” reply to this broadside of abuse is notable for its weakness104 yet, in the last stage of an unbalanced polemic, one distinction muddled in previous installments is drawn clearly by the persona of Adrian IV. “Divisum itaque habemus,” he writes about the papal and imperial spheres of inﬂuence, “nos cis Alpes, ille trans Alpes.”105 Threatening to reverse the translatio imperii de Greco in Teutonicum,106 the “pope” uses against the “blasphemous” Germans one 98

“De qualitate autem operis vos, dilectissimi domini mei, videritis, quos in hoc opere arbitros elegimus et correctores. Vobis enim adiudicandum erit quod editis, per vos iudicandum quod delendum duxeritis.” Gesta Frederici 4, 86, p. 714. 99 See Rubinstein, “Political Rhetoric,” pp. 33 – 34. 100 “Vos itaque ambos in hoc opere preceptores, testes et iudices eligo, rogans, . . . si quid corrigendum est, ad regulam veritatis emendare, si quid parum aut superﬂue dictum est, vel radere vel superaddere, quantum satis est, non pigritemini.” Gesta Frederici, 3, prol., p. 394. 101 See H. Höing, “Die ‘Trierer Stilübungen.’ Ein Denkmal der Frühzeit Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossas,” Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 1 (1955), pp. 257–329 and 2 (1956), pp. 125 –249. 102 Ibid., p. 319, 3. 103 Ibid., p. 320, 5. 104 Ibid., pp. 323 –29, esp. 323, 327. 105 Ibid., p. 327, 7. 106 Ibid., p. 328, 7.

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arguments.107

of their favorite Aware of the intellectual inferiority ascribed to them by their critics in the curia, these stulti Alemanni108 were determined to prove the contrary. If the foundation of a Reichskirche can no longer be alleged as one of the aims of Reinald’s policy, the conﬂict between the empire and the papacy in which he played a leading role led, in chancery circles, to the polemical formulation of a transalpine identity. In the context of its ideology, the (misleadingly termed) “school exercises” of Trier are signiﬁcant, because they provide an insight into the Archpoet’s milieu. Fictive counterparts to a political controversy, they reveal the freedom with which this writer’s colleagues manipulated scriptural sources. In an imperialist parody of the arguments adopted by Adrian IV, they seek to undermine the basis of his authority. Auctoritas, as Barbarossa and his agents represent it, is independent of Rome. To deny or challenge this position is to become a madman, a blasphemer, a schismatic. The language of heresy appropriated to secular ends, the papal monarchy is derided as a caricature of the empire. A “counter-culture,” opposed to that of the Roman curia and dialectical in its expression, had begun to develop in the chancery where the Archpoet worked. When he addressed his patron in the following terms: et transmontanos, vir transmontane, iuva nos109

he was not voicing “German national sentiments”110 but declaring, in a spirit of anti-Roman solidarity consistent with his polemic against “Italian prelates,” his membership in an intellectual circle “north of the Alps.”111 There an audience attuned to his methods is addressed as viri docti (1, 1, 2) in Lingua balbus.112 Nothing that the Archpoet has to say is unknown to them; none of them is incapable of understanding his sermo. Why then does he deliver it? Necessitas, declares the disingenuous preacher, coupled with pia intentio (1, 1; 3, 4). Piety and impatience are ascribed to his listeners, versed in the language of the liturgy, when he imagines them interjecting the concluding formula of the mass—“Tu autem” (1, 4, 4)—if he is too long-winded. Transforming a topos of brevity into a common 107

Ibid., p. 324, 1. Ibid., p. 320, 6. 109 Carm. 3, 14, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld. 110 Pace K. Langosch, “Der Archipoeta war ein Deutscher!” Historische Vierteljahrsschrift 30 (1936), pp. 493– 547. 111 For a different view cf. P. Dronke in Adcock, Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, p. xxi, contesting the opinion that the Archpoet “came . . . from Cologne,” which Schieffer and Fried do not assert. Nor do they make the historical error of imagining the Archpoet to have been “Reinald’s fellow-townsman,” for the archbishop did not come from Cologne. That the Archpoet had “connections” there (whether “regular” or otherwise), in 1162– 64, is certain. 112 Carm. 1, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, pp. 47– 52. 108

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sense of clerical humor, he recites the shared tenets of the faith. From the ﬁfth to the twenty-ﬁfth strophe—for one-half of his sermo, after its exordium (I, 1–4)—the Archpoet speaks, in the ﬁrst person plural, about beliefs held by him and his audience. The dogmas of the incarnation, the virgin birth, and the cruciﬁxion elaborate, in a somber spirit of apparent repentance, the difference between truth and falsehood. The pleasures of this world are vanities (I, 15, 17); Christ’s suffering inspires compassion (I, 21–23); and as Judgment Day approaches, there is cause for fear (I, 23– 25). Only pagans in the pre-Christian dispensation were seduced by “the fables of poets” (I, 10); after divine revelation “nothing is hidden, all is open” (I, 11, 2); “the truth speaks plainly” (I, 12, 2). Having enumerated the reasons to mistrust his art in the ﬁrst part of his work, the Archpoet proceeds to deconstruct them in the second. At the side of the disciples of the divine judge on whose throne they shall sit (I, 26, 29), are placed his hearers, “ornaments to the church.” Admonished to persevere with good works, they are reminded that charity is the highest virtue (I, 32, 3). Quoting the Bible on that subject (I, 35ff.), the Archpoet appeals to the “diligence in the study of scripture” (I, 26, 2) practiced by those in Reinald of Dassel’s entourage whom he depicts as his moral superiors. Possessed of an altruism that this self-styled egoist lacks (I, 37), they are reminded, in the following lines, of qualities in which he surpasses them: Si vendatur propter denarium indumentum quod porto varium, grande mihi ﬁet obprobrium; malo diu pati ieiunium. Largissimus largorum omnium presul dedit hoc mihi pallium, magis habens in celis premium quam Martinus, qui dedit medium. (I, 38–39) If the parti-colored coat which I am wearing has to be sold to raise money, it would be a great disgrace for me, I would rather go hungry for a long time. Most generous of all the openhanded, the bishop gave me this pallium, receiving a greater reward in heaven than [Saint] Martin who gave half of his.

Clad in one of the parti-colored cloaks, the abolition of which Reinald of Dassel had opposed in 1148, the Archpoet emphasizes his closeness to his patron. Drawing attention to his immorality, he challenges the moral-

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ists in the arch-chancellor’s entourage who set themselves up as iudices. On the last days, he has stated, they will sit in judgment (1, 29, 4). Before the end of the world, however, his aim is to make the easy chair of authority uncomfortable for his critics. The only tribunal to which, in the here and now, the Archpoet will submit is that of his master, who has presented him with a pallium (1, 39, 2). If, by his gift, Reinald had proved himself more openhanded than Martin, it would hardly have been lost on the Archpoet’s listeners that relics of that saint were purportedly translated to Cologne in 1164.113 Such pious booty was useful to the archbishop-elect, who had not yet even been ordained a priest. Bitterly disputed at the highest levels of the church,114 his consecration at the hands of the antipope followed, under pressure from the emperor, on 2 October 1165. To that forthcoming event the Archpoet alludes, making a joke of a controversy. The pallium, or archbishop’s robe symbolic of Rome’s conﬁrmation of the validity of his election, was not in Reinald’s possession in 1164, nor was it conceivable then that he would ever acquire it from Alexander III. And why not? Because, of course, the generous prelate had bestowed on his favorite the insignia of ofﬁce denied to himself. It followed, in the hilarious logic of the Archpoet’s version of events, that the other members of the chancery at Cologne should stop carping at his expense and display a similar largitas. Wearing the gaudy pallium of Reinald’s favor, he again stations himself in parallel to the archbishop-elect. Neither of them, in 1164, was quite what he seemed to be and both were implied by the scurrilous author to be distinct, in their special relationship, from their colleagues or underlings. Dressed in the ﬁgurative sobriety of their Christian virtue, these “ornaments of the church,” “lanterns of the Christian people” (1, 26, 3), and “wise virgins” (I, 27) might reap, at the end of time, the rewards of their “contempt for this world” (I, 26, 4). In the meantime they were invited to make a collectio mutua on the Archpoet’s behalf (I, 40ff.). His poverty, like his selfinterest, set him apart from his audience whom he addressed, in the plural, as “you” (I, 43, 1). To “you,” he assured them, the ﬁgurative wine of hope and the metaphorical corn of faith would eventually be granted by God (I, 44, 2–4). “For us” the winning wastrel desired, in short order, real alcohol and lots of money (I, 45). Previously (I, 35–43), he had spoken of himself in the ﬁrst person singular. Now he employs a plural that includes Reinald of Dassel. Let others, at home and abroad, practice abstemiousness, parsimony, restraint. In the metropolis of Cologne, at the archepiscopal court, this impecunious client could afford to ﬂaunt the ﬁnery of his patron. 113

Neuss-Oediger, Das Bistum Köln, p. 229. For Adrian IV’s condemnation of Reinald’s election as archbishop of Cologne, cf. John of Salisbury, Ep. 124 in Letters 1, p. 212. 114

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A particular time, a speciﬁc place, and a distinctive culture provide a setting for the Archpoet’s work. They serve to enhance, not diminish, its singularity. Clichés of the vagantes, such as wine, women, and song, are transposed by him into a spiritual setting invested with ambiguity. That ambiguity does not simply derive from the techniques of a verbal craftsman combining, in ever bolder patterns, a mosaic of classical and biblical allusions. The complexity of the Archpoet’s art matched that of the connoisseur for whom it was produced: Reinald of Dassel, like Bernard of Clairvaux, “neither a cleric nor a layman.” Alert to debates in the twelfth-century church that raised questions of authority and control, the archbishop-elect was aware that, to his contemporaries, some of the most pressing issues were the deﬁnition of sin, the function of repentance, and the role of confession.115 A confessio by this self-proclaimed immoralist116 therefore raised piquant problems. Although intermittently treated in verse since the Carolingian period,117 the subject had never lent itself to the medium. Were poets not liars? And if an Archpoet, a fortiori, labored under that suspicion, how was he to write about a sacrament that commemorated one of the central truths of the faith? How could he compose a poetic confession for an “arch-schismatic”? The crux of the matter, for many thinkers, was penance. At a time when that sacrament was becoming desacralized, they turned, for a defense of its efﬁcacy, to Gregory the Great. Gregory, in his inﬂuential Moralia in Job,118 attempted to reconcile the necessity of expiation with the efﬁcacy of contrition, and his views were often cited as authoritative in discussions of the differences between external acts and inward sentiments, between reparation of secret faults and atonement for public sins.119 The role of the priest was stressed by the Victorines; the intention and conscience of the penitent by Abelard and his followers;120 and while a contrast was regularly 115 See P. Anciaux, La Théologie du sacrement de pénitence au xiie siècle (Louvain, 1949), and R. Blomme, La Doctrine du péché dans les écoles théologiques de la première moitié du xiie siècle (Louvain, 1958). 116 Carm. 10, ed. Watenphul-Krefeld, pp. 73–76. For different approaches see F. Cairns, “The Archpoet’s Confession: Sources, Interpretation, and Historical Context,” MlJb 15 (1980), pp. 87–103; J. Hamacher, “Die Vagantenbeichte und ihre Quellen,” MlJb 18 (1983), pp. 160–67; and Dronke, “The Archpoet and the Classics.” 117 Cf. P. v. Moos, “Gottschalks O mi custos: eine confessio 1,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 4 (1970), pp. 201– 30 and “2,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 5 (1975), pp. 317– 58 and P. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 40 – 41. 118 See R. Wasselynck, “Les Compilations des Moralia in Job du viie au xiie siècle,” RTAM 29 (1962), pp. 5– 32 and id., “L’Inﬂuence de l’ exégèse de S. Grégoire le Grand sur les commentaires bibliques médiévaux (viie - xiie),” RTAM 32 (1965), pp. 157–204. 119 Anciaux, Théologie, pp. 119ff.; 138ff. 120 Ibid., pp. 208ff.

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drawn, in treatises of that title, between vera et falsa penitentia, there was much disagreement, in an age that displayed strong tendencies toward an “interiorization of morality,”121 as to whether the most serious form of penance (penitentia solemnis) should be performed publicly, before a bishop.122 Before Reinald, elect of Cologne, the Archpoet recites his confessio (10, 6, 1). His stance, like his language, is that of Job as interpreted by Gregory the Great: in amaritudine loquar mee menti. (10, 1, 2) let me speak in bitterness to my mind.

The true penitent, comments Gregory on Job 10:1, detests his faults, accuses himself in bitterness, and submits to punishment.123 Not a few, however, the saint observes, seem candid in their self-accusation but “know not how to groan in confession and declare what they should lament in joyful tones.”124 Recognizable to his audience from Gregory’s much-studied work, such is the pose adopted by the Archpoet. Non sum puer, etatem habeo, he had declared at I, 35, 4: if the infantility less of age than of ignorance was understood as the mental state to be adopted by the sinner who was due to perform penance,125 he would do the opposite and knowingly feign contrition for faults he proceeds to extol. Instability is the ﬁrst that is mentioned (10, 2), in a strophe that marks this secular cleric’s distance from an ideal that the reformers were anxious to impose on monks.126 Keeping the gay company of his likes, the wicked or depraved (10, 3, 4), he sets himself apart from the perfecti, tearful and solemn (10, 4, 1): Iocus est amabilis dulciorque favis. (10, 4, 2) Joking is delightful to me, and sweeter than honeycomb. 121

Blomme, Doctrine, pp. 338ff. See J. Longère, ed. Alain de Lille. Liber penitentialis 1 (Louvain, 1965), pp. 185– 86. Cf. C. Barbera, “La teologia del sacramento della penitenza in Alano di Lilla,” Studia Patavina 8 (1961), pp. 442– 99. 123 “Loquar in amaritudine animae meae. Qui culpas suas detestans loquitur, restat necesse est, ut has in amaritudine animae loquatur, ut haec ipsa amaritudo puniat quicquid lingua per mentis iudicium accusat. Sciendum uero est, quia ex poena paenitentiae, quam sibi mens irrogat, aliquatenus securitatem percipit; atque ad interrogationem superni iudicis ﬁdentior exsurgit, ut semetipsam subtilius inueniat, et erga se, quaeque quomodo disponantur, agnoscat.” S. Gregorii Magni Moralia in Iob Libri I-X, ed. M. Adrien, CCSL 143 (Turnhout, 1979), 44, 7, p. 504, 1–7. 124 “Sed sunt nonnulli qui apertis uocibus culpas fatentur, sed tamen in confessione gemere nesciunt et lugenda gaudentes dicunt.” Ibid., 43, 66, p. 504, 12–14. 125 Alan of Lille, Liber penitentialis, ed. Longère, 2, 1, 1, p. 20, 24 –25. 126 Cf. A. Wathen, “Conversio and Stability in the Rule of Saint Benedict,” Monastic Studies 2 (1975), pp. 1– 44. 122

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Iocus, for the prescribers of penitentia, was a manifestation of lies.127 Here it is associated with sweetness, a cardinal metaphor in the course and at the end of the poem. It is sweetness that leads to the primrose path (10,5,1): to cura cutis and promiscuity, drinking, and gambling. Enumerating each of these faults (“ﬁrst, second, third:” 10, 10–11), the Archpoet parodies the puritans’ legalism. And he does so with speciﬁc references (10,8–9) to his patron’s stay at Pavia in the late autumn of 1163. Away from home, is the implication, the arch-chancellor was no stranger to these temptations for which circumstances extenuated. Addressed rather as a man of the world than as a prelate or confessor, Reinald, on hearing the Archpoet declaring his wish to die in a pub surrounded by angelic choirs singing, “sit Deus propitius huic potatori!”

did not need to reﬂect utrum peccaverit scienter vel ignoranter.128 There was hardly a sin in the canon which this “penitent” did not claim to ﬂout; scarcely a rule in the handbooks which he did not boast of breaking. The ethics of intention that sought to eliminate mala uoluntas from external acts of pleasure129 were made nonsense by this riotous yet reﬁned conﬂation of the moralists’ divisions and subdivisions of sin. But if their solemnity is turned to ridicule, the purpose was not frivolous. For the Archpoet then goes on to identify, in his failings, the motive force of his art: Unicuique proprium dat Natura munus: ego nunquam potui scribere ieiunus; me ieiunum vincere posset puer unus: sitim et ieiunium odi tamquam funus. (10, 16) Nature gives each man his particular gift: I could never write on an empty stomach; a boy, alone and unaided, could knock me down in such a state: I hate hunger and thirst like a funeral.

Was Reinald of Dassel, while laughing at these verses, meant to observe that their combination of Propertius with Saint Paul on the subject of sex is made yet more ironical if one adds an allusion to the fortieth chapter of the Benedictine rule on the daily measures of monastic drink?130 Or was this prince of the church capable of rising above the verbal level of the text to see, in the mirror image of his client’s art, a reﬂection of his own persona? Impudens scurrilitas verborum, as practiced by the Archpoet, is not merely stylistic. Its combination of the secular and the sacred achieves an 127

Alan of Lille, Liber poenitentialis, ed. Longère, 2, 1, 35, p. 36. Ibid., 2, 1, 23, p. 33. 129 Ibid., 2, 1, 21, p. 32. 130 Hamacher, “Die Vagantenbeichte,” p. 165 and Dronke, “The Archpoet,” pp. 66 – 67. 128

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effect of shock or amusement parallel to the one that Reinald, with his outrageousness and bravura, exercised on his contemporaries. Hence the appeal, to this unconventional prelate, of the boldness with which inverted categories are traditionally employed to denounce vice. Twisted into new standards, they enable the Archpoet to make his confessio into a form of counter-accusation: Ecce mee proditor pravitatis fui, de qua redarguunt servientes tui. Sed eorum nullus est accusator sui, quamvis velint ludere seculoque frui. (10, 20) Look, I have betrayed my own wickedness, of which your servants accuse me. But none of them accuses himself, although they wish to live it up and enjoy this world.

Displaced from their judges’ thrones of I, 29, the moralists are banished to the margins of a scene where, in the public glare of a confessio solemnis, his conversion and rebirth are announced (10, 22–23). Pity should be taken on him who seeks forgiveness, penance imposed on him who avows his fault (10, 24, 2–3)—but not too harshly, because: quod caret dulcedine, nimis est amarum. (10, 25, 4) what lacks sweetness is too bitter.

An allusion to the indulgentia recommended when penitential rigor would thwart its purpose?131 Or a reference, as double-edged as the “sophistical contrition”132 that animates the rest of the poem, to the sweetness of “Venus’s commands” celebrated at the point when its author begins to exalt his own sins (10, 4, 3)? One of them was drunkenness, a vice against which reformers inveighed. Rupert of Deutz, in his comments on the ﬁrst book of Joel (1:5), identiﬁed dulcedo with luxuria, which led, he claimed, to the bitterness of grief (doloris amaritudo).133 Penance should be undertaken by those in such a 131

Alan of Lille, Liber penitentialis, ed. Longère, 2, 2, 13, p. 55. For the term see ibid., 2, 2, 1, p. 45. 133 “‘Expergiscimini, ebrii, et ﬂete et ululate omnes, qui bibitis vinum in dulcedine quoniam periit ab ore vestro.’ Notandum, quo sensu dicat, ‘qui bibitis vinum,’ addendo ‘in dulcedine.’ Non enim vini creaturam, sed bibentium tali sermone condemnat luxuriam, eo quod non tantum ad necessitatem implendam, sed ad voluptatem concitandam vinum, quia dulce est, immoderate hauriant. Nunquam autem sine doloris amaritudine amittitur, quod cum dulcedine possidetur aut bibitur. ‘Quoniam,’ ergo, ‘periit ab ore vestro expergiscimini,’ inquit, o ‘ebrii,’ qui sicut alius propheta dicit, ‘potentes estis ad bibendum vinum, et viri fortes ad miscendam ebrietatem.’ ‘Expergiscimini,’ id est hoc argumento sinite vos perdoceri, quod cura sit Deo de hominum factis, et quod in novissimo die suo magno et horribili, sicut praediximus vobis, cuncta in iudicium adducturus sit, quia iam partim iudicat et partim punit, dum ab ore vestro 132

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state. That movement of thought—from dulcedo to amaritudo to penitentia—is reversed by the Archpoet, possibly because he knew Rupert’s work and certainly because he was familiar with the structure of admonition which it and similar writings contained. Amused by this swipe at the most vehement of the local moralists, the electus Colonie (10,24,1) had even more reason for mirth at the expense of their leading champion on the European scene. For the simulata confessio that Reinald’s client exploited had been identiﬁed and described, in graphic detail, by Bernard of Clairvaux. “There are quite a few,” wrote that robust satirist in the eighteenth chapter of his De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, “who, when they are accused of obvious faults, knowing that their self-defense will not be believed, make up a subtler argument to defend themselves and reply in the words of a crafty confession . . . Their faces bowed, their bodies prostrate, they wring forth a few tearlets, if they can, interrupting their speech with sighs and their words with groans. Not only do people of this kind not seek to excuse the reproaches leveled at them, but they themselves even exaggerate their faults, with the effect that, while you hear them adding some impossible or unbelievable detail about their guilt from their own lips, you are led to disbelieve what you thought certain and, from being sure about the falsity of what is confessed, you lapse into doubt about what you deemed secure. As they afﬁrm what they do not want to be believed by confessing, they defend their fault; and when confession resounds laudably on their lips, wickedness continues to lurk in their hearts.”134 Has a more telling description of the Archpoet’s “Confessio” ever been written—before the work itself? Have admirers of the “profanity” of Goliardic verse ever considered its boldest exponent as a religious thinker? From the portrayal of the false penitent and the “feigned confession” by the arch-reformer, the Archpoet of Barbarossa’s minister took his model. Not by chance. Shortly before the emperor’s edict against the Cistercians,135 Bernard of Clairvaux was being parodied by a member of dulce vinum perit. Sic expergefacti, tunc demum ‘ﬂete et ululate’—id est poenitentiam agite, ut mala ventura, mala his multa majora, possitis evadere.” PL 168, 208. 134 “Nonnulli enim, cum de apertioribus arguuntur, scientes, si se defenderent, quod sibi non crederetur, subtilius inveniunt argumentum defensionis, verba respondentes dolosae confessionis.[. . .] Vultus demittitur, prosternitur corpus; aliquas sibi lacrimulas extorquent, si possunt; vocem suspiriis, verba gemitibus interrumpunt. Nec solum qui eiusmodi est obiecta non excusat, sed ipse quoque culpam exaggerat, ut dum impossibile aliquid aut incredibile culpae suae ore ipsius additum audis, etiam illud, quod ratum putabas, discredere possis, et ex eo quod falsum esse non dubitas, dum conﬁtetur, in dubium veniat quod quasi certum tenebatur. Dumque afﬁrmant quod credi nolunt, conﬁtendo culpam defendunt, et aperiendo tegunt, quando et confessio laudabiliter sonat in ore, et adhuc iniquitas occultatur in corde.” Sancti Bernardi Opera 3, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1963), 3, p. 51,12 - p. 52,4. 135 See above, p. 195 and n. 19.

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Reinald’s chancery in a style and a spirit faithful to those of his own satirical prose. Motivating that satire is a “transalpine” polemic that enables the Archpoet’s stance to be deﬁned with exactitude. On the hierarchy of vices and virtues erected by Bernard, he was to be stationed at the ninth grade of superbia. There his “proud humility” and “twisting and turning” (tergiversatio) should swiftly be detected for what they were “by a prelate.”136 That the prelate to whom this “confession” was addressed would not fail to do so, is its author’s expectation. That Reinald, in his hostility to the Cistercians and their allies, would take the attitude opposite to the one recommended by Bernard is the reason for the Archpoet’s conﬁdence. When he compared himself to a gliding river, a drifting boat, and an aimless bird (10,1–2), he was lying through his teeth. The foundation for the apparently precarious mixture of outrageousness and irony in his work lay in the ecclesiastical politics of the early 1160s. Undermining the position of the reformers in terms they would have understood, this subversive “confessio” made a contribution to eliminating the poenitentia solemnis. What Abelard had advocated solemnly,137 Reinald and his client effected with laughter. Or so it is pleasing to think. Antireformist, antiascetic, antimoralistic, and anti-Roman; erudite, sophisticated, profane, and provocative; expert in the conventions, the deportment, and the mores of clerical conduct, while defying them by his worldliness, his wit, and his ﬂair, the Archpoet developed the persona of a literary spokesman of a “counterculture.” Counter both to the ideals of the arch-chancellor’s enemies and to the rhetoric of his client’s rivals, it united servant and master in the intimacy of an alternative ideology. Voicing their common cause in an impudens scurrilitas verborum, they exasperated (and intended to exasperate) the likes of John of Salisbury. But when, resorting to abuse, that apologist for Rome denounced the “barbarous Germans,” he asserted the opposite of the truth. One of the reasons why the “brutish Teutons” of the sixth decade of the twelfth century were in no hurry to receive the “new learning”138 was that, in the literary sphere, they had no reason to feel the need. At the itinerant center of the sacrum imperium, in the circle of Reinald of Dassel, these bruti et impetuosi homines occupied one of the summits of medieval European culture. 136 137

De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, in Sancti Bernardi Opera 3, p. 52, 11. M.-D. Chenu, L’Éveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris, 1969),

p. 24. 138 Cf. J. Fried, “Die Rezeption bologneser Wissenschaft in Deutschland während des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Viator 21 (1990), pp. 103 – 45.

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HYSICE DE DEO PHILOSOPHATUR, claimed William of SaintThierry when denouncing William of Conches to Bernard of Clairvaux. “He cracks the joke that the name of the Holy Spirit is derived from [analogy with] a breath.”1 Making light of the divine mysteries was a charge which Bernard had leveled at Abelard, whose errors were continued and extended by the “new philosophy” of William of Conches, “adding very many of his own.”2 It was no use to plead against condemnation of suspect works because the teachings they contained were not to be found elsewhere;3 Saint Paul (Galatians 1:8–9) provided grounds for anathematizing opinions that diverged from tradition. If William of Conches was not a heretic, then he was a pagan; and it should be clear to anyone acquainted with the doctrines of the faith that the views he was currently promoting had been crushed long ago with the full weight of auctoritatis censura.4 William, sneered his accuser, was a nobody without authority.5 Authority was the issue that the accused had raised in the prologue to his Philosophia.6 Many “usurped the name of master,” declared William of Conches, although they knew nothing about the subjects they professed. Ready to instruct those willing to learn, he had no time for incorrigible ignorance. Only “peasants” of the intellect sought to prevent others from acquiring the knowledge they lacked. Too arrogant to ask the experts, too swift to censure their betters, they did not derive conﬁdence from their wisdom but presumptuousness from their cowls.7 If the monk William of Saint-Thierry wrote in stinging terms about his namesake, the reason was that he had already felt the lash. The monastic censors of scholarship, according to William of Conches, lent an ironical twist to the prophecy of Isaiah (24: 2): “The priest shall be 1 Spiritum sanctum ab anhelitu dictum iocatur.” J. Leclercq, ed., “Les Lettres de Guillaume de Saint-Thierry à Saint Bernard,” in Recueil 4, p. 367, 7, 289. On William of SaintThierry’s conﬂict with William of Conches, see T. Gregory, Anima mundi. La ﬁlosoﬁa di Guglielmo di Conches e la scuola di Chartres (Florence, 1955), pp. 141ff. 2 Leclercq, ed., “Lettres,” p. 358, 1, 8ff. 3 Ibid., p. 361, 2, 85ff. The reference is to Philosophia 3, 12, ed. G. Maurach (Pretoria, 1980), p. 22. 4 Ed. Leclercq., p. 361, 1, 2, 100–104. 5 Ibid., p. 358, 1, 1, 6 –7, 14 –16. 6 Maurach, ed., Philosophia 1, 1–2, p. 17. 7 Ibid., 2, 44– 45, p. 39.

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people.”8

like the Reduced to the level of the ignorant plebs, these selfappointed guardians of culture were not the only ones he castigated for falling short of his ideal of learning. There were also those who “tore to pieces” the garment of philosophia that, at the beginning of his third book, William conceived as a seamless whole.9 Invidia was their motive—envy at the unity and the integrity of his learning, which “today amounts to a danger.” Idle curiosity co-existed with stupidity, insubordination, and arrogance.10 The roles of master and pupil were reversed, and love of knowledge for its own sake was scorned by incompetent teachers in their rush to make money.11 Recanting the impugned doctrines of the Philosophia in his Dragmaticon, dedicated to Geoffrey the Fair, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, between 1144 and 1149, William called for those who possessed the book to join in his condemnation.12 Although retreating on the theological front, he gave no ground in his cultural polemic, extending and sharpening his arguments against modern magistri, whom he now divided into two types. There were those who proclaimed, ex cathedra, that they had acquired an entire wardrobe of wisdom, when they had merely ﬁlched a few rags. And there were those who, on their episcopal thrones, thought only of their own proﬁt, favoring unworthy clerics and neglecting the better sort.13 In the chasm of ignorance that yawned between the fraudulent magisterium of the schools and the failed magisterium of the bishops, all dignity and authority had been lost. Scholarship was in decline; sound doctrine was neglected; masters “with pricking ears” ruled the roost.14 Appropriating the rhetoric of his opponents, William of Conches came to share their bleak vision. As the end of the world approached—visible and tangible from the stunted bodies and curtailed lives of his contemporaries15 —boys and fools were appointed to the cure of souls; a barber offering a tonsure was enough to create a monk; a new kind of cowl sufﬁced for ready-made religion.16 In this dire state of affairs (now described as a golden age of the Parisian schools) even a numbskull from Normandy might dedicate to its duke an account of the cosmos and man.17 8

Ibid., 2, 44, p. 39. Ibid., 3. 1, p. 73. 10 Ibid., 4, 1, p. 88. 11 Ibid., 4, 55, p. 114. 12 Dialogus de substantiis physicis . . . , ed. W. Gratarolus (Strasbourg, 1567; reprint Frankfurt, 1967), pp. 6–7. For the chronology of William’s works, see Guillaume de Conches. Glosae super Platonem, ed. E. Jeauneau (Paris, 1965), p. 14. 13 Gratarolus, ed., Dialogus, pp. 2– 3. 14 Ibid., p. 35 and cf. p. 63. 15 Ibid., p. 78. 16 Ibid., p. 158. 17 See best A. Speer, Die entdeckte Natur: Untersuchungen zu Begründungs-Versuchen 9

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Alienated from the schools, critical of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, William of Conches sought refuge with a lay patron.18 As tutor to the future Henry II of England and partner in a ﬁctitious dialogue with his father, William attempted to apply to secular culture what he had failed to implement among the clergy. When the magistri of his own generation approached a problem or a text, they were accustomed to ask, with narrow-minded specialism: cui parti philosophie supponatur?19 The wrong question, asserted William. Both in his youthful commentary on Macrobius and in the glosses on the Latin Timaeus which he composed during his maturity, he insisted that the works that he treated belonged to every part of philosophy; that their aims and scope were ethical.20 Probability replacing Abelard’s insistence on necessity,21 concordantia artium could be preserved by combining different branches of knowledge. The method to be used was integumentum.22 Beneath the veil of outward form, it was possible, with integumental techniques drawn from all the artes, to discern the profounder truth that, when Plato assigns an equal number of stars to the souls created by God, he is not guilty of heresy but presenting, causaliter, non localiter, a philosophical insight into the natural world that is lost on those who read him literally.23 Defending, in Christian terms, the orthodoxy of the Timaeus, William of Conches was also championing his own authority as theologian.

einer “scientia naturalis” im 12. Jahrhundert (Leiden, 1995), pp. 130–221. Cf. D. Elford, “William of Conches,” in Cambridge History, pp. 308 –27. 18 For context see J. Ehlers, “Das Augustinerchorherrenstift St. Viktor in der Pariser Schulund Studienlandschaft des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Aufbruch—Wandel—Erneuerung, pp. 102– 22, esp. 105ff. 19 See R. Hunt, “The Introductions to the Artes in the Twelfth Century,” in Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, ed. G. Bursill-Hall, Studies in the History of Linguistics 5 (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 117– 44. 20 “Cui parti philosophie supponatur minime querendum est, dum non uni soli parti, sed omni supponitur. Quod ut evidentius appareat, a genere ipsius, id est a scientia incipiamus.” Accessus ad Macrobium, Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek ms. class. 40, fol. 6ra Cf. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 14557, fol. 102v: “Possemus dicere, quod non uni tantum parti, imo omni parti philosophie supponatur liber iste [ . . . ] utpote est sciendum intentionem ipsam supponi ethice,” with id., Glosae super Platonem, ed. Jeauneau, pp. 60ff.: “Non uni tantum parti philosophie supponitur, sed de pluribus aliquid in eo continetur [ . . . ] De omnibus igitur partibus philosophie aliquid in hoc opere continetur.” 21 “Sed antequam de illis tractem, te moneo quod non ubique necessarias quaeras rationes; sufﬁcit namque nobis si verisimiles adducimus. Sed quando nostrum scriptum aliorum scriptis comparare volueris, illis qui de his melius scripserint assensum adhibe. Non est enim quaerendum qui dixerunt, sed quid dixerunt. Non tamen nego qualitatem persone bono operi maiorem gratiam conferre.” Dragmaticon, ed. Gratarolus, pp. 22f. Cf. id., Glosae super Platonem, ed. Jeauneau, p. 115ff. with Abelard, Dialectica, ed. De Rijk, pp. 217 and 271ff. 22 See above, pp. 67ff. and n. 45. 23 Glosae super Platonem, ed. Jeauneau, pp. 210 –12.

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In the cosmology of Plato’s work were revealed, to “us who love him,”24 the elements for reconstructing, physice et ethice, an integrated culture. Dismembered by the specialists, the ignoramuses, and the monks, the unity of learning, understood in this full and emotive sense, provided William with a defense against the attacks of bigots and boneheads. The same ideal is linked with the ideology of an elite in the work of Thierry of Chartres.25 When, in the prologue to his commentary on Cicero’s De inventione, he excluded the vulgus profanum and that “mixed bag of cockiness in the schools,” contrasting true magistri like himself with the “pseudo-geniuses who pour scorn on scholarship” and the “ham-actors of scholastic dispute armed to the teeth with empty words,”26 Thierry drew a distinction comparable to William’s. A dullard to the uncultivated, a necromancer or heretic in the eyes of “the religious,”27 Thierry had to endure their doubts about his competence in the arts of language and their slights on his ability as a teacher.28 His reply, couched as a challenge and counter-manifesto, was delivered in the prologue to his Heptateuchon, where this hierophant of learning combined the quadrivial and trivial disciplines in a “synod of the seven liberal arts.”29 The choice of that term was signiﬁcant. Unlike Soissons and Sens, convened to proscribe the suspect doctrines of Abelard, the “synod” imagined by Thierry was gathered ad cultum humanitatis. And if Grammatica, a “matron severe in appearance and dress,” took precedence, that was not only in keeping with a “Chartrian” interest in textual exegesis but also consistent with the mounting current of scholarly opinion that identiﬁed, in accurate interpretation, a safeguard against arbitrary charges of error.30 Were not Thierry’s detractors incapable of telling the difference between a magician and a heretic? Were they not puffed-up sophists, pretentious charlatans, and crafty frauds? Behind this cultural polemic lay an anxiety, widespread among intellectuals in the mid twelfth century, about vulgar misrepresentation, one-sided attacks, and abused authority. The solution Thierry proposed to this dilemma was withdrawal from the common herd to a realm of learning in which, accessible only to the privileged few, the resources of the liberal arts would be employed as totius phylosophye unicum 24

Ibid., p. 211. Cf. P. Dronke, “Thierry of Chartres,” in Cambridge History, pp. 358– 85 with the critique of Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 228– 85, 285ff. 26 The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, ed. K. Fredborg, Pontiﬁcal Institute of Medieval Studies and Texts 84 (Toronto, 1988), p. 49, 1–12. 27 Ibid., p. 108, 23 –28. 28 Ibid., p. 108, 29 – 35. 29 See above, p. 162 and n. 57. 30 See above, p. 118. 25

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ac singulare . . . instrumentum.31 Philosophy, deﬁned as love of wisdom, offering a rational approach to theology, the unity of culture served as a guarantee of the “physicist-philosopher”‘s liberty.32 This model of the concordantia artium,33 with Grammatica at its center, was adapted and modiﬁed by Bernardus Silvestris when he dedicated to Thierry the Cosmographia.34 About the intellectual personality of Bernardus much is known; about his biography far less.35 That he taught at Tours in the second quarter of the twelfth century is certain and, if it is probable that he was attached to SaintMartin, then his titular abbot was the king of France.36 Royal protection guaranteed the rights, or secured the pretensions, of the abbey in its conﬂicts with the bourgeois of Tours. The close links of Saint-Martin with the crown—reﬂected in the appointment of Henry of France, son of Louis VI, to be its treasurer37 (an ofﬁce which he still held when the Cosmographia was composed)—may have inﬂuenced Bernardus’s decision, unlicensed by the classical source on which he based his Mathematicus, to make of its hero a king.38 Popes also loomed large in the affairs of twelfth-century Tours,39 and the frequency of papal interventions in the affairs of the abbey was one factor that motivated Bernardus’s bid for the favor of Eugenius III in the Cosmographia.40 But there were others. When the pope sojourned in France during 1147–48, he was confronted with Gilbert of Poitiers’ cause célèbre.41 If Gilbert’s orthodoxy could be questioned, that of Bernardus Silvestris was 31 See E. Jeauneau, Lectio philosophorum: Recherches sur l’ Ecole de Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973), p. 89. 32 See Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 286ff. and E. Maccagnolo, Rerum universitas. Saggio sulla ﬁlosoﬁa di Teodorico di Chartres (Florence, 1976), pp. 250ff. 33 For the concept, see von Moos, Geschichte, p. 336ff and below pp. 234ff. 34 All references are to the edition of P. Dronke (Leiden, 1978). Recent studies, with bibliography, include C. Ratkowitsch, Die Cosmographia des Bernardus Silvestris. Eine Theodizee, Ordo. Studien zur Literatur und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit 6 (Cologne, 1995); F. Tauste Alcolcer, “Opus Nature.” La inﬂuencia de la tradición del Timeo en la “Cosmographia” de Bernardo Silvestre (Barcelona, 1995); and B. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century. A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972). 35 Still fundamental is A. Vernet, “Bernardus Silvestris et sa Cosmographia,” Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Positions des thèses 1937 (Nogent-le-Rotrou, 1937), pp. 167–74. Cf. P. Dronke, “Bernardo Silvestre,” in Enciclopedia Virgiliana 1 (Rome, 1988), pp. 497– 500. 36 See J. Boussard, “L’Enclave royale de Saint-Martin de Tours,” Bulletin de la société nationale des Antiquaires de France (1958), pp. 157–78. 37 See J. Boussard, “Le Trésorier de Saint-Martin de Tours,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 46 (1960), pp. 67– 88, esp. 80 – 81. 38 See below, pp. 255ff. 39 Cf. C. Lelong, “Culture et société (ive-xiie siècles),” in Histoire de Tours, ed. B. Chevalier (Toulouse, 1985), p. 89. 40 Megacosmus 3, 65 – 66, in Cosmographia, ed. Dronke (bk. II), p. 105. 41 See above, pp. 123ff.

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legend,42

also liable to doubt. For while his “pagan humanism” is a it is perhaps fortunate that this interpretation of the Cosmographia was never suggested to Bernard of Clairvaux or William of Saint-Thierry. Bernardus, however, had forseen the problem and taken the precaution of submitting his work to the pope. According to a marginal gloss in one of the best manuscripts,43 the Cosmographia was “recited in the presence of Eugenius III and won his warm approval.” There was a difference, in 1147–48, between sending a work to Thierry of Chartres with a plea for his “judicious criticism” and opinion on whether it should be published44 and presenting it to a pope who had to deal with a famous case of heresy. An informal request for “correction” from a celebrated teacher whose approval lent the Cosmographia, on its appearance, an aura of intellectual support lacked the quasi-ofﬁcial status of censura praevia which, in the atmosphere of crisis that surrounded Gilbert’s trial, Bernardus Silvestris was cautious enough to acquire. Control offered protection, and authority was exercised not over the content of the work but its context.45 The immediate context of Bernardus Silvestris’s work was provided by his teaching, as illustrated by his commentaries on Virgil and Martianus Capella.46 The Commentum on the Aeneid descends to us in two versions that stem from the notes on recollectae of Bernardus’s students.47 Although his exegesis of Virgil’s poem was intended to offer them instruction in style 42

Curtius, ELLMA, p. 111; E. Gilson, “La Cosmogonie de Bernardus Silvestris,” AHDLM 3 (1928), pp. 5–24 with P. Godman, “The Search for Urania. Cosmological Myth in Bernardus Silvestris and Pontano,” in Innovation and Originalität, ed. W. Haug (Tübingen, 1993), pp. 70– 98, esp. 72ff. 43 Dronke, ed., Bernardus’s Cosmographia, pp. 2 and 65 – 66. 44 Ibid., p. 96. 45 See above, pp. 7ff. 46 All references are to the editions by J. and E. Jones, The Commentary on the First Six Books of the “Aeneid” of Virgil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (Lincoln, Neb., 1977) and H. Westra, The Commentary on Martianus Capella’s “De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii” Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (Toronto, 1988). It is recognized that, if the Aeneid-commentary is authentic, then the commentary on Martianus Capella is also by Bernardus Silvestris (cf. ed. Dronke, ed., p. 3). Convincing are the arguments of S. Gersch, “(Pseudo-?) Bernard Silvestris, and the Revival of Neo-Platonic Virgilian Exegesis,” in Sophies Maietores: Chercheurs de sagesse: Homage à J. Pépin, ed. M. O. Goulet-Cazé (Paris, 1992), pp. 573–93. Cf. E. R. Smits, “New Evidence for the Authorship of the Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil’s Aeneid Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris,” in Non Nova, Sed Nove. Mélanges de civilisation médiévale dédiés à W. Noomen, ed. M. Gosman (Groningen, 1984), pp. 239 – 46; C. Baswell, “The Medieval Allegorisation of the Aeneid: Ms. Cambridge, Peterhouse 158,” Traditio 41 (1985), pp. 181–237; and J. W. Jones, “The So-Called Silvestris Commentary on the Aeneid and Two Other Interpretations,” Speculum 64 (1989), pp. 835–48. 47 See M. Pastore Stocchi, “Per il commento all’ Eneide di Bernardo Silvestris: un manoscritto e un ipotesi’,” Lettere italiane 27 (1975), pp. 75 – 82.

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conduct,48

and models of the ﬁrst of these purposes is not evident in the course of Bernardus’s analysis. Composition, related to but distinct from interpretation, took place at an earlier stage of education, among the preliminary exercises or preexercitamina designed for the pueri. Commentum came later, as a part of what William of Conches, in his unpublished observations on Priscian, calls the genus enarrativum.49 Presented with a mixture of allegory and moralism, Bernardus’s work emphasizes to its adolescent audience the dangers of the ﬂesh.50 And that says much about the level to which the Commentum was addressed. The Aeneid, as Bernardus Silvestris taught it, was not a text conﬁned to the trivium but a work suitable for more advanced students.51 Hence the presence, throughout his Commentum, of natural science and philosophy; the cross-references, in Bernardus’s later exegesis of Martianus Capella, to the treatment of integumentum in his remarks on the Aeneid;52 the claim that Virgil, Martianus, and Boethius, in a line of imitative dependence, treat “virtually the same subject.”53 It is one thing to regard Virgil as a philosopher and to depict his poem as an allegory of our quest for selfknowledge. It is another, in a teaching context, to equate the author of the Aeneid with the writers of those quadrivial texts, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii and Philosophiae Consolatio. Bernardus Silvestris, in his commentary on Virgil, was revising the place of poetry in twelfth-century systems of knowledge—elevating its traditionally inferior role, in order to attribute to it a philosophical and ethical virtus that others, such as Hugh of SaintVictor, in his inﬂuential Didascalicon, assigned to different subjects.54 48 C. Padoan, “Tradizione e fortuna del commento all’ Eneide di Bernardo Silvestre,” IMU 3 (1960), p. 234. 49 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 15130, fol. 5rb, on which see Jeauneau, Lectio philosophorum, pp. 335 –70. The expression genus hermeneuticum, recorded by L. Reilly in his edition of Petrus Helias, Summa super Priscianum 1 (Toronto, 1993), p. 15, does not occur in this passage. 50 E.g., Jones and Jones, p. 10, 4ff. (Venus); p. 26, 2ff. (Dido); p. 54, 10ff. (Eurydice) et passim. 51 See Hunt, Collected Papers, p. 21 and C. H. Kneepkens, “Master Guido and His Views on Government: On Twelfth-Century Linguistic Thought,” Vivarium 16 (1978), p. 123. See further below, p. 239. 52 “Accessus ad Martianum,” 99 –100, ed. Westra, p. 46. Cf. 95, 25 –27. 53 Ibid., p. 47, 114 –20 with P. Dronke, “Integumenta Vergilii,” in his Intellectuals and Poets, pp. 63–78. 54 With the classiﬁcation of the sciences and the role attributed to practica by Hugh in his Divisio philosophiae, ed. Offergeld, pp. 402– 4: “Tria sunt: sapientia, virtus, necessitas . . . haec tria remedia sunt contra mala tria, quibus subiecta est vita humana: sapientia contra ignorantiam, virtus contra vitium, necessitas contra inﬁrmitatem. Propter ista tria mala exstirpanda quaesita sunt ista tria remedia . . . propter sapientiam inventa est theorica, propter virtutem inventa est practica, propter necessitatem inventa est mechanica. Istae tres usu primae fuerunt, sed postea propter eloquentiam inventa est logica. [ . . . ] Theorica dividitur in theologiam, physicam, mathematicam. Theologia tractat de invisibilibus substantiis, physica de invisi-

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Where Hugh dismissed poetry as one of the mere appendentia artium,55 Bernardus added it to the customary tripartite division of knowledge into sapientia, eloquentia, and mechanica that provided a fourfold ascent to the heights of philosophy.56 If eloquence is “more brilliant than poetry,” philosophia outshines them both;57 and while the “Hesperic shores” of Aeneid 6.6 are “the beginnings of poetic study,”58 it leads directly to the trivian groves of eloquence59 and from there to the heights of the quadrivium.60 In Aeneas’s quest for wisdom, however, poetry represents a snare. Lingering over the delights that it offers, he is admonished to move on,61 for in the higher sphere of pure thought—of mathematics and theology— intelligentia, divested of “poetical and rhetorical adornments,” has a natural beauty of its own.62 Couched in the Pythagorean and Platonic terms bilibus visibilium causis, mathematica de visibilibus visibilium formis . . . ,” cf. Bernardus’s commentary on the Aeneid, p. 36,5 – 9: “Quattuor namque mala sunt que humanam infestant naturam: ignorantia, vicium, imperitia loquendi eloquentia, indigentia. His quattuor malis quattuor bona sunt opposita: ignorantie sapientia, vicio virtus, impericie loquendi eloquentia, indigentie necessitas. Pro sapientia adipiscenda inventa est theorica disciplina, pro virtute poetica; pro eloquentia eloquendi disciplina; pro necessitate mecania. . . .” And his commentary on Martianus Capella, p. 78, 893 – 921: “Naturam nostram quatuor infestant mala: ignorantia, silentium, vicium, defectus. Silentium autem [ . . . ]. His quatuor malis totidem remedia contraposita sunt: ignorantie agnicio, silentio facundia, vitio virtus, defectui valitudo. Quia vero reperte sunt scientie pro malis exsirpandis et conservandis bonis . . . prefate quatuor institute sunt discipline . . . sapientia enim fugat ignorantiam formans agnitionem. Eloquentia pellit silentium comparans facundiam. Poesis extirpat vicium inserens virtutem. Mecania amovet defectum assequens valitudinem . . . ideoque theorica . . . tripartita est. Primum genus, ut in primis diximus, incorporeorum est genus, invisibilis substantia, ut deus, angelus, anima. Secundum invisibilis visibilium causa, ut calor, humor. Tercium visibilis visibilium forma, ut multitudo, magnitudo.” 55 Didascalicon 3, 4, ed. T. Offergeld, in Hugo von Sankt Viktor, Didaskalion de Studio legendi, Studienbuch Fondis Christianae 27 (Freiburg, 1997), pp. 230 – 32. See further above, pp. 165ff. 56 Jones and Jones, ed., p. 32, 14 –24. A parallel to the Ysagoge in Theologiam by Abelard’s pupil Odo (ed. A. Landgraf, Ecrits théologiques de l’ école d’Abélard [Louvain, 1934], pp. 70– 72) is discussed by M. Evans, “The ‘Ysagoge in Theologiam’ and the Commentaries Attributed to Bernard Silvestris,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991), pp. 1–42. 57 Jones and Jones, ed., pp. 33 – 34. 58 Ibid., p. 34, 4. 59 Ibid., p. 36, 21. 60 Ibid., p. 38, 8ff. 61 Ibid., p. 38, 24. 62 “Non compte [Aeneid 6.48]: non colorate. Intelligentia enim rethoricorum colorum ornatum non querit, cum naturalem habeat pulchritudinem. Si enim incorporeorum speculationes quis respiciat, veluti mathematica, theoremata, et theologiam—id est divinam paginam—in quibus maxime operatur intelligentia, vix in eis aliquam reperiet colorum exhornationem. Ad hoc enim ornatus rethorici sunt inventi, ut rethoricas vel poeticas, non philosophicas, exornent orationes, quae in sua integritate suum habent ornatum.” Ibid., p. 43, 9–55.

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that Thierry of Chartres derived from Boethius,63 the esthetic of Bernardus Silvestris—none of whose works are mathematical or theological— pointed to an ideal unattainable by himself. The lower plane of poetry and rhetoric was the one on which he moved; and if this rhetorical and philosophical poet strove to forge a new medium that would meet his own exacting standards, it was with misgivings about the ambiguous status of verse.64 Ambiguity was a salient theme of twelfth-century philosophy that ﬁgures prominently in the hermeneutics of Bernardus’s commentaries. They are informed by the theory of integumentum.65 That is why he likens the integumental “cover” or “shroud” to a type of epideictic oratory that contains the truth. For if, in . . . misticis voluminibus, truth cannot be located in a single aspect of the equivocationes and multivocationes that possess varied references and distinct connotations, they must be analyzed in logical terms, with attention to the deceptiveness of fallaciae.66 Study of the inherent plurality of meaning, to which the reception of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi gave fresh impetus,67 is conducted, in Bernardus’s commentaries, under the inﬂuence of Saint Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and of his De dialectica.68 Within a Neoplatonic framework of two levels of meaning 63 Cf. Philosophiae Consolatio 5, pr. 4, 30ff., ed. L. Bieler, CCSL 94 (Turnhout, 1967), p. 97; and De trinitate 2, 5ff., ed. H. Steward and E. Rand, Boethius. The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 8; with Thierry of Chartres, Commentum super Boethii librum “de trinitate” 2, 6, 8 and 9, ed. N. Häring, Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School (Toronto, 1971), p. 70, 64f., 85ff. and 71, 93–96; and Maccagnolo, Rerum Universitas, pp. 72ff. and 104ff. Note the exclusion, by Bernardus, of physica, which appertains not to intelligentia but to ratio (ibid., p. 107). 64 See J. Jolivet, “Les Rochers de Cumes et l’antre de Cerbère. L’Ordre du savoir selon le commentaire de Bernard Silvestre sur l’Enéide,” in Pascua Mediaevalia. Studies voor J. De Smet, ed. R. Lievens (Louvain, 1983), pp. 263 –76. 65 On ambiguity see above, p. 169 with n. 101. 66 “Integumentum est genus demonstrationis sub fabulosa narratione veritatis involvens intellectum, unde etiam dicitur involucrum [ . . . ] Notandum est vero in hoc loco, quemadmodum in aliis misticis voluminibus, ita et in hoc equivocationes et multivocationes esse et integumenta ad diversa respicere. Verbi gratia ut in libro Marciani per Iovem modo accipis ignem superiorem, modo stellam, modo et ipsum creatorem [ . . . ] Hic autem diversus integumentorum respectus et multiplex designatio in omnibus misticis observari debet, si in una vero veritas stare non poterit. Ergo in hoc opere hoc idem reperitur quod idem nomen diversas designat naturas et contra diversa nomina eandem.” Jones and Jones, ed., p. 3, 14–15; p. 9, 16–24 and cf. K. Jacobi, “Logic (ii): The Later Twelfth Century,” in Cambridge History, p. 238ff. 67 See S. Ebbesen, Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Sophistici Elenchi.” A Study of Post-Aristotelian Ancient and Medieval Writings on Fallacy, 1: The Greek Tradition (Leiden, 1981), pp. 159ff. 68 See J. Pinborg, “Das Sprachdenken der Stoa und Augustins Dialektik,” Classica et Mediaevalia 23 (1962), 148ff., especially pp. 168ff.; H. Rueff, “Die Sprachtheorie des Augustinus in De dialectica,” in Geschichte der Sprachtheorie 3, pp. 3–11; G. Strauss, Schriftge-

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(the poetical ﬁction of the surface and the deeper philosophical truth), the Commentum considers the problem of ambiguity in categories Augustine had adopted from Stoic thought.69 The Stoics construed the problem differently from Bernardus. Despite their stress on the importance of literature, especially poetry, Stoical views of ambiguity were negative. A possible link between ambiguity and creativity was excluded by them from the outset. It was thus consistent with their theory when Augustine, discussing Chrysippus’s thesis (“With great accuracy it is said by the dialecticians that every word is ambiguous”70) in a manner congenial to a dominant strand of twelfth-century thought, was concerned with the ways in which ambiguity might be eliminated by the study of context.71 Context plays a marginal role in Bernardus Silvestris’s exegesis of the Aeneid, which aims not to eradicate but to expand the polyvalency of this work. Its meaning is made to depend on its interpreter’s dexterity. The Sibyl of Aeneid 6, for example, represents both divinum consilium and intelligentia72 —a ﬁgure of converse with our higher nature that is compared to Boethius’s Philosophia.73 Thus far the integumentum is comprehensible in terms of the equation of self-knowledge with philosophical descent. But when Bernard discusses the leaves on which the Sibyl is asked not to write at Aeneid 6.74,74 he asserts his freedom from context, multiplying the work’s interpretative possibilities that the Stoics had sought to limit. In Stoic allegoresis it is the logos of the word that imitates itself in the text.75 The interpreter’s task is to discover, beyond that imitation, correspondences between the structure of a myth and the order of nature. His authority is not independent; the principle for which he seeks takes precedence over his own task, which is to reduce the ambiguity and to eradicate brauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tübingen, 1959), pp. 100f.; and J. Pépin, Saint Augustin et la dialectique (Wetteren, 1976), pp. 94ff. 69 See C. Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993). The problem is not addressed by M. Lapidge, “The Stoic Inheritance,” in Cambridge History, pp. 81–112; G. Verbeke, The Presence of Stoicism in Medieval Thought (Washington, 1983); or M. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages, 2 (Leiden, 1985). 70 “Rectissime a dialecticis dictum est ambiguum esse omne verbum.” De dialectica 9, ed. J. Pinborg and D. D. Jackson (Dordrecht 1975), pp. 106 –14 with Pépin, St. Augustin et la dialectique, pp. 55ff., 94ff. 71 See Atherton, The Stoics, pp. 292ff. 72 Jones and Jones, ed., p. 31, 22–23 with Gersch, “(Pseudo-?) Bernardus Silvestris,” p. 586. 73 Jones and Jones, ed., p. 43, 20ff. 74 See above, p. 157 and n. 38. 75 See A. Le Boulluec, “L’ Allégorie chez les stoiciens,” Poétique 23 (1975), pp. 301–21, and G. Most, “Cornutus and Stoic Allegoresis: A Preliminary Report,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, ed. H. Temporini-Vitztum, 2: Principat 36.3 (New York, Berlin, 1989), pp. 2014 – 65.

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the polysemy that occasion his own activity. The problem is most acute in the case of names, common and proper, and, of the two, the second are superior, because they refer to speciﬁc individuals and are thus capable of approximating to ideal conditions of univocality. Proper names also stand at the center of Bernardus Silvestris’s theory of integumentum. They are interpreted in a manner that contrasts sharply with Stoic methods. Consider, for example, Bernardus’s exegesis of “Mercury” at Aeneid 5: By Mercury, you are sometimes to understand the star, at others eloquence: a star, as in that myth in which you read about Venus’s adultery with Mercury, in that you understand that those stars, on rising, combine their effects; as eloquence, where Mercury seeks to marry Philology. “For unless eloquence is joined with wisdom it does little good, and can indeed harm.” And for that reason it is depicted as a bird or a dog, since speech runs swiftly. It is said to carry a rod, with which it separates the snakes from one another, for it possesses the gift of interpretation, with which it disentangles those who quarrel and spew forth poisonous words. It is said to preside over theft, because it deceives the minds of its listeners. It is said to preside over merchants, because salesmen dispose of their goods by the gift of the gab. So it is that Mercury is said to be virtually the kirios—the tutelary deity—of merchants—or Mercury—that is, running about in the center—or Mercury, the enterprise of merchants—or Mercury, the chariot of the intellect—because it produces ideas. That is why it is even called Hermes, that is, “interpreter.” For hermeneia equals interpretation.76

An integumentum about integumentum, this passage illustrates salient characteristics of Bernardus Silvestris’s method. That two of the governing ideas are commonplaces, derived from Cicero’s De inventione and Martianus Capella, does not diminish their interest, for they profess a mistrust in their medium that is belied by conﬁdence in its hermeneutic validity. Interpretatio, a rod of verbal discernment, is identiﬁed with hermeneia; and the bond that attaches them is the capacity to generate ideas. 76 “Per Mercurium aliquando accipis stellam, aliquando eloquentiam: stellam ut in ea fabula, in qua legis Venerem adulteratam cum Mercurio, per hoc quod intelligis stellas illas in accessu suo effectus suos iungere; eloquentiam, ubi Mercurius Philologie connubium querit. ‘Eloquentia enim, nisi iungatur sapientie, parum prodest, immo etiam obest.’ Atque ideo depingitur avis vel canis, quia sermo cito currit. Dicitur virgam gerere, qua serpentes dividit, quia habet interpretationem, qua rixantes et venenum verborum effundentes secernit. Furto dicitur preesse, quia animos audientium fallit. Mercatoribus preest, quia eloquentia a se merces extrudunt vendentes. Unde dicitur Mercurius quasi mercatorum kirios—id est deus—vel Mercurius—id est medius discurrens—vel Mercurius—mercatorum cura—,vel Mercurius— mentium currus—quia excogitata profert. Unde etiam Hermes dicitur, id est interpres. Hermenia enim est interpretatio.” Jones and Jones, ed., p. 25, 2–14.

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There is no lack of them in the Commentum. Given the doubts voiced about rhetoric, its parentage is paradoxical: for who is the mother of the multiple identities of Mercurius but eloquentia, and who their father other than the sapientia of the interpreter? Attributing an objective status to the union of Mercury and Philology, Bernardus demonstrates unequivocally, through aequivocitas, that the text is the servant of its exegete.77 His authority is limitless. Following the vertiginous sequence of explanations that runs from “so it is” to “produces ideas” above, no one but their inventor has reason to know why, when, and where they should end. An inﬁnite plurality of meaning is evoked by the hermeneutics of Bernardus at just the point where he claims that they are under control. Yet the assertion is not merely rhetorical. Control exists—in the ingenuity of the exegete, developed in the setting of mental gymnastics, or exercitatio animi, that played a central role in the twelfth-century “thought by alternatives.”78 How individual Bernardus’s alternative was, how provocative he intended it to be, can be understood as an alternative to methods being developed in the contemporary theory of fallacy, which were concerned to restrict the ambiguity that he exploits, and to the rules of biblical exegesis, as laid down by Hugh of Saint-Victor, which subordinated the sententia of the interpreter to that of scripture by prescribing the limits of an admissible explanation in terms of its context.79 For Bernardus, all depended on the reader’s inventiveness and knowledge—or their absence. “Ignorance,” he comments on Aeneid 6.287, “is a hydra,” containing “several ambiguities, which signiﬁes inﬁnite heads.” Hercules, the wise man, cuts off one head, but “as he demonstrates an aspect of the ambiguity of a problem, more spring up.” Seeing that his labors are in vain, he burns the hydra in the “most vital ﬁre of the mind,” identiﬁed with the “zeal of enquiry and the splendor of knowledge” in the manner of Boethius (Consolatio 4, pr. 6,3).80 A heroization of the exegete takes place in the course of Bernardus’s Commentum. The modern Hercules, battling against the monster of ignorance, wins victory over a foe in whose inﬁnitude lies both its horror and its attraction. The interpretation of a secular author such as Virgil provided a substitute for the combat-grounds of the dialecticians and the cloistered precincts of the theologians. Applied to a 77 See P. von Moos,”Was galt im lateinischen Mittelalter als das Literarische an der Literatur? Ein theologisch-rhetorische Antwort des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Literarische Interessenbildung im Mittelalter, DFG Symposium 1991, ed. J. Heinzle (Stuttgart, 1993); pp. 444 – 45. 78 Id., Geschichte als Topik, pp. 280ff.; pp. 401ff.; pp. 438ff. 79 Didascalicon 6, 9, ed. Offergeld, p. 392 with B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1952) pp. 94 – 95. See further below, pp. 273ff. 80 Jones and Jones, ed., p. 71, 19 –29. (Cited with admiration by Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis 3, 5, ed. B. L. Ullman [Zürich, 1961], p. 193, 3ff.).

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text different from those monopolized by the modish and the orthodox paladins of exegesis, integumentum offered Bernardus an opportunity to prove his dexterity in the skills at which his rivals claimed to excel. Hence his interest in minimizing the relevance of context: in cultivating, while combatting, the hydra of ambiguity. Here Bernardus may be distinguished from William of Conches and others.81 If aequivocitas and multivocitas, in William’s hermeneutics, are considered positively, in his grammatical and semantic theory, which separates ambiguity from denotation,82 aequivoca are presented negatively—as a problem or a danger. So too William’s follower and popularizer, Peter Helias, for whom removenda ambiguitas is a recurrent concern.83 And in the commentaries by Thierry of Chartres on Cicero’s De inventione, the status of rhetoric itself is ambiguous, for ambiguity is a rhetorical product.84 This issue was not solely linguistic or philosophical. Like Bernardus Silvestris in his Commentum,85 Thierry emphasizes the social doctrine of the De inventione—the civic utility of union between sapientia and eloquentia. He interprets Cicero in the same way as Bernard of Chartres before him had understood Plato: as a political thinker who had written de ordinatione rei publicae.86 That order was menaced, at the levels of language, rhetoric, and politics, by this subversive phenomenon developed in integumental hermeneutics. And not only there. “How can one practice natural science,” Daniel of Morley was to lament in his Philosophia (I,5), when the lucidity of the Arabs 81 “Il ne faut pas se scandaliser, dit notre auteur, de ces interprétations divergentes d’une même fable, mais bien plutôt se réjouir. Un moderne penserait qu’en se multipliant les interprétations se détruisent les unes les autres. Pour les hommes du 12ième siècle elles témoignent, par leur multiplicité même, de la richesse du texte à commenter.” Jeauneau, Lectio Philosophorum, p. 139. The reference is to William’s glosses on the myth of Orpheus in Boethius’s Consolatio 3, metr. 12: “Sed non est curandum de diversitate expositionum, immo gaudendum, sed de contrarietate, si in expositione esset” (ibid.). 82 See K. Fredborg, “Some Notes on the Grammar of William of Conches,” Cahiers de l’ institut du moyen âge grec et latin (Copenhagen) 37. (1981), esp. pp. 28ff., and cf. ead., “Speculative Grammar,” in Cambridge History, p. 184. 83 Summa super Priscanum 2, ed. Reilly, pp. 957– 69 and see ibid., Index Rerum, s.v. “ambiguitas”; “equivocatio” and “multivocatio,” “multivocum.” 84 E.g., Proemium in librorum primum, ed. Fredborg, p. 57,28 – 36: “Cum igitur constet artem ex se bonam esse, in malis vero hominibus nocivam, in bonis autem utilem, cum, inquam, hoc sit, non quaerit Tullius simpliciter an bona an mala sit—hoc enim ambiguitatem faceret, utrum de natura artis an de effectu deliberaretur—immo vero circa effectum deliberat, an plus boni scilicet an plus mali hominibus efﬁciat. Si enim plus mali confert, malam esse hominibus constat, qualiscumque in se fuerit, nec ei studendum est, quod Aristoteles putavit; si autem plus boni, bonam esse putandum est. Bonum enim sive malum aequivoce dicitur, vel quod retinet in se qualitatem alterius eorum, vel quod bonam rem vel malam efﬁcit.” 85 See above, p. 157. 86 See above, pp. 163ff.

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is obscured “by ignorance and ﬁctions shrouded in double meanings, with the effect that the error of uncertainty is concealed beneath the shadow of ambiguity?”87 Yet Daniel, unable to abandon the beguiling method that he deplored, continued to attest its spell.88 The point was paradoxical: although integumental exegesis enabled its practitioner to establish his distinctness, because his aim was to establish a concordantia artium, his work inevitably encroached on that of others bent on asserting their independence. Many-sided in their adaptability, integumenta were, by implication, all-encompassing. Some saw this as a threat. The reasons were many. The consequences both for the pursuit of letters and for the other disciplines on which it touched were far-reaching. The part of the encyclopedic glossator is expanded by Bernardus Silvestris into the role of the creative interpreter, building his own imaginative system on the profane texts he discusses. For him, there exists a distinction of function between hermeneutics and literature without a difference of substance or intent, as is shown by his major poem, the Mathematicus, and by his prosimetrum, the Cosmographia—two works that occupy a central place in the unexplored borderland between the domains of twelfth-century philosophy and literature. Bernardus’s commentaries on Virgil and on Martianus Capella are remarkable not for their normative but for their speculative quality. If their form is pedagogical, their content raises them above the mundane requirements of the classroom to the level of independent thought. And although that thought ﬁnds a focus in the issue of poesis and eloquentia which Bernardus’s theory leaves unresolved, in practice he strives for a solution that a didactic setting failed to provide. For in the context where poetry and rhetoric are traditionally thought to have been pressed into pedagogical service—in verse written, as school exercises, to form a counterpart to the judicial and deliberative declamations of classical antiquity89 —Bernardus (or a paraphrast closely linked with him) sought to demonstrate the ambivalence of their relationship. That ambivalence is displayed in the “preparatory pieces” ascribed to him—De paupere ingrato and De gemellis, which draw, respectively, 87 “per ignorantiam ﬁgmenta quibusdam ambagibus obvoluta . . . ut ita sub umbra ambiguitatis error incertus tegeretur.” G. Maurach, ed., MlJb 14 (1979), pp. 204– 55, esp. 212. 88 B. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972), p. 62. 89 ELLMA, pp. 161ff; H. Walther, Das Streitgedicht in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters rev. P. Schmidt, (Munich, 1965), pp. 21ff.; and, on the background of paraphrase, P. Klopsch, “Vers und Prosa in der mittellateinischen Literatur,” MlJb 3 (1961), pp. 9–24; P. Godman, ed., Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York (Oxford, 1982), pp. 78ff.; R. Wieland, “Geminus Stilus,” in Insular Latin Studies, ed. M. Herren (Toronto, 1981), pp. 113–33.

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on Controversia 5.I of the elder Seneca and on the eighth of pseudoQuintilian’s minor declamations: . . . —it is a fact, not an empty fable, as the auctores demonstrate and Quintilian’s writing.90

Thus the opening of De gemellis, advertising its origins in (pseudo-) Quintilian in order to camouﬂage the falseness of its claim to veracity, the implausibility of its distinction between res and fabula. For it was the fabulous quality, the unreality, of the pseudo-Quintilian’s eighth minor declamation that constituted its principal attraction for Bernardus, or the paraphrast linked with him, who composed, as a counterpart to it, this ingenious and mediocre poem. The ample dimensions and high-ﬂown rhetoric of the ancient oratio on the theme of a father accused by his wife of having taken the life of one of their ailing twins in order to save that of the other are compressed into a taut narrative of seventy-six lines. Point and pathos, antitheses of expression and extremes of emotion, are concentrated, in the brief compass of De gemellis, to deﬁne a dilemma and state a pithy solution. Interest is focused less on the feelings of the protagonists than on the sententiousness of the writing, and the clash of passions serves to display verbal inventiveness. Succinctness is the ﬁrst feature that De gemellis shares with its counterpart, De paupere ingrato, an equally sparse treatment of Senecan controversia. But ornateness is the second feature that, paradoxically, these two paraphrases have in common. They achieve their effect not by their nearness to reality but by their distance from it. Fabula is their actual purpose, verba their chief preoccupation. Res are merely their pretext for pyrotechnics of style. That style and that purpose consign these rhetorical poems to the lower echelons of Bernardus’s hierarchy of knowledge. And there a problem remained to be resoved. Could his half-formulated literary theory be worked out in the detail of his poetic practice? Speciﬁcally: was it possible, using the modest techniques of the classroom exempliﬁed by De gemellis and De paupere ingrato, to ascend to a higher sphere than that customarily occupied by a verse paraphrase? This was the challenge Bernardus Silvestris faced when, with the fourth of pseudo-Quintilian’s major declamations as his model, he set out to write the Mathematicus.91 90 “—res est, non fabula vana, / Auctores perhibent et pagina Quintiliana” (vv. I-2). R. Edwards, ed., “Poetic Invention and the Medieval Causae,” MS 55 (1993), pp. 183 –217, esp. 198. 91 No less than three editions have recently appeared: J. Prelog, M. Heim, M. Kiesslich, Bernardus Silvestris. “Mathematicus,” Studien zur Theologie und Geschichte 9 (Saint Ottilien, 1993); T. D’Alessandro, “Mathematicus sive Patricida,” in Tragedie latine del xii e xii secolo, ed. F. Bertini (Genua, 1994) pp. 7–159; and D. Stone, “Bernardus Silvestris, Mathematicus. Edition and Translation,” AHDLM 63 (1996), pp. 209 – 83. References are to the numeration of Prelog, Heim, and Kiesslich.

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The stately books, intended not for classroom use but for public display and private study, which transmitted to him pseudo-Quintilian’s Declamationes maiores served both a literary and a didactic function.92 They presented this sceptic of rhetorical colores with a work, the appeal of which, to its ancient audience, has been likened to that of the cinema to a modern public.93 Although the fourth declamatio maior contains one of the oldest continuous treatments of astrological problems in Roman prose, no one, in antiquity or later, read it in order to ﬁnd a solution to the problems of astral determinism and free will.94 In the address of a son to the senate for permission to avoid, by killing himself, the crime of parricide which an astrologer had predicted that he would commit, it is argued both that fate is ineluctable and that the menace can be averted. With a torrent of selfcontradictory rhetoric—much of it strikingly banal—the son proclaims his determination and his desperation, asserts his strength of will, yet admits his lack of control.95 Coherence is not the strength of his case, and even its vehemence collapses, at the conclusion, beneath the weight of its inconsistencies. Declaring that he will have his way, should the senate deny him permission to end his life, the son undermines the effect of this protestation by conﬁding his anxiety that “I fear that I will kill my father, as I die.”96 Never more uncertain than when afﬁrming his resolve, the son, by his grandiloquence, produces bathos. Hence the fragility of his appeal to ratio.97 The son’s attempt to justify the astrologer’s authority on rational grounds rings doubly hollow for being voiced by one whose purpose in evoking that authority is to refute it. He is in a quandary and the pathos (or bathos) of his situation is conveyed by the inability of his rhetoric to cope with the dilemma that overwhelms his reason. And there lay the challenge that Declamatio maior 4 offered to Bernardus Silvestris, apologist of stylistic purity, advocate of ra92 On the transmission of pseudo-Quintilian’s Declamationes maiores, see L. D. Reynolds, ed., Texts and Transmissions. A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), pp. 334 – 36; L. Håkanson, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 2, 32, 4 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 2272– 2306 and his introduction to the Teubner edition, Declamationes xix maiores Quintiliano falso ascriptae (Berlin, 1982). For the use of pseudo-Quintilian’s works in ﬂorilegia, see R. H. and M. A. Rouse, “The Florilegium Angelicum: its Origin, Content and Inﬂuence,” in Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander (Oxford, 1976), p. 99. On the Loire-links of the transmission, see P. K. Marshall, J. Martin, and R. H. Rouse, “Clare College Ms. 26 and the Circulation of Aulus Gellius 1–7 in Medieval England and France,” MS 42 (1980), pp. 374 – 85. 93 W. Koch, Die vierte der neunzehn grösseren Deklamationen des Quintilian. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Willensfreiheit (Leipzig, 1934), p. 4. 94 G. Lehnert, “Zauber und Astrologie in den erhaltenen römischen Deklamationen,” in Volkskundliche Ernte H. Hepding dargebracht (Giessen, 1938), pp. 131– 39. 95 Cf. 13 (Håkanson, p. 74, 14ff.), 20 (ibid., p. 82, 13ff.). 96 “Metuo, ne patrem, dum morior, occidam.” 4, 23 (ibid., p. 84, 16 –17). 97 Ibid., 13–15 (especially 14), and p. 76, 4ff.

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tional restraint. Pseudo-Quintilian’s emotional oratio represented all that was contrary to his own esthetic. The style and form of Bernardus’s model were not the only reasons for Bernardus’s interest in this work. Pseudo-Quintilian had written his fourth major declamation on, or around, a subject that was stimulating debate. Astrology’s status was being questioned in the second and third quarters of the twelfth century with a rigor and in a detail absent from earlier medieval discussions of its role.98 Acceptance of the subject’s usefulness in fathoming the natural world was accompanied, in orthodox circles, by hostility to the pretensions of the mathematicus to foretell the future. Bernardus himself contrasts, in his commentary on Martianus Capella, De nuptiis I, 19,99 the credulity of the superstitious, who believe the planets to be divine, with the informed opinion of the moderni who allow only that the stars, intermediaries between God and humans, inﬂuence our behavior insofar as we follow our temperaments that are subject to them. These and related issues found a place in eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin literature. In the sixth chapter of his Liber decem capitulorum, Marbod of Rennes, for example, treats the theme de fato et genesi in terms comparable to those of the Mathematicus;100 while John of Salisbury discusses them early in the Policraticus.101 Peter of Blois deplores the premature study of such topics by the scholarly upstarts whom he likens to Icarus;102 and Hildebert of Lavardin dwells on the same problems in his De querimonia et conﬂictu carnis et spiritus seu animae 103 and in his De casu huius mundi.104 Fortuna, who ﬁgures prominently in that poem, is invested with disreputable traits of femininity. Fickle, erratic, and cruel, she is an em98 See M. Donati, “Metaﬁsica, ﬁsica, e astrologia nel xii secolo. Bernardo Silvestre e l’introduzione “Qui celum” del Experimentarius,” SM 31 (1990), pp. 649 –704 and M.-T. D’Alverny, “Astrologues et théologiens au xiie siècle,” in Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu, (Paris, 1967), p. 35 and 50 (cf. too her “Abélard et l’astronomie,” in Pierre Abélard. Les Courants Philosophiques, pp. 611ff., especially p. 622) and J. D. Lipton, The Rational Evaluation of Astrology in the Period of Arabo-Latin Translation ca. 1126 –1187 A.D., Ph.D. dissertation (University of California at Los Angeles, 1978). See also L. T. Gregory “Astrologia e teologia nella cultura medievale,” in id., Mundana sapientia. Forme di conoscenza nella cultura medievale, Storia e litteratura 181 (Rome, 1992), pp. 291– 328. 99 Westra, ed., n. 41, p. 208. 100 Marbodi liber decem capitulorum, ed. R. Leotta (Rome, 1984), pp.147– 65. 101 Policraticus 1, 8 –10, 2, 18 –20. 102 “Quidam antequam disciplinis elementaribus imbuantur docentur inquirere de puncto, de linea, de superﬁcie, de quantitate animae, de fato . . . de casu et libero arbitrio.” PL 207, cols. 312–13 (Ep. 101). 103 PL, 171, cols. 989 –1004. 104 B. Scott, ed., Hildeberti Cenomnanensis episcopi carmina minora, no. 22 (Leipzig, 1969), pp. 11–25.

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bodiment of all the misogynistic clichés reproduced in the ﬁrst part of Hildebert’s verse triptych on the three vices, De muliebri amore.105 He neither invented this genre106 nor added to it much that was original, but he accentuated its tendencies to a virtuoso style. Hildebert’s denunciation of muliebritas in general is offset by his praise of particular women. The masculine virtues attributed to speciﬁc nuns and princesses stand in contrast to the vices he elsewhere condems in their sex. This juxtaposition was inﬂuential, as the diptych De muliere mala and De muliere bona in the second and third chapters of Marbod’s Liber decem capitulorum107 or Petrus Pictor’s De muliere mala and De matronis 108 show. Coexistence of contradictions did not diminish the rhetorical force of cognate genres of praise and blame. Antithetical but inseparable, their point lay in their irreconcilability. When Hildebert and Marbod both attacked and praised women in the same or successive works, they raised a deeper issue than the sincerity (or otherwise) of the conventional arguments they advanced. That issue was, if every inherited position evokes its opposite in a rhetorical culture, does the only ﬁxed point of meaning lie in ambiguity? That problem could not be solved by conventional methods—by yet another polished version of topoi, formulas, or clichés. A revaluation of rhetoric was needed, an examination of the philosophical possibilities offered by a literary medium employed to surface effect by some and despised by others for its superﬁciality. The cognitive status that could be attributed to poesis and eloquentia was Bernardus Silvestris’s concern, and he approached it, at the beginning of the Mathematicus, by the way of two themes that had been linked but never probed by earlier Medieval Latin poets: femina and fortuna. That is why it is worthwhile to consider in detail how his medium is shaped by his message. 105

Ibid., no 50, pp. 40 – 41. A modern study of medieval Latin misogynistic literature is lacking. For the vernaculars cf. R. H. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991). The best study of (selected) prose texts is by P. Delhaye, “Le Dossier anti-matrimonial de l’Adversus Jovinianum et son inﬂuence sur quelques écrits latins du xiie siècle,” MS 13 (1951), pp. 65–86. There are observations of value in C. Pascal, Poesia latina medievale (Catania, 1907), pp. 43ff. and Letteratura latina medievale (Catania, 1909), pp. 107ff.; P. Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages. New Departures in Poetry 1100 –1150 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 125ff. and M. Blockner, “Frauenzauber und Zauberfrau,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 76 (1982), pp. 1– 39. The older bibliographical compilations for vernacular literature, such as F. Brietzmann, Die böse Frau in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1914) and F. T. Utley, The Crooked Rib (Columbus, Ohio, 1914), take little account of the Latin material. 107 Leotta, ed., pp. 97ff. and 112ff. 108 Petri Pictoris carmina, ed. L. van Acker, CCCM 25 (Turnhout, 1972), pp. 105ff. and 123ff. 106

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It is a general rule of the human condition that those who are happy always have grounds to complain.109

Thus the opening of the Mathematicus. The language and the thought are Boethian—taken from the discussion of personal fortuna at Philosophiae Consolatio 2 pr. 4: “Who indeed is so completely happy that he does not ﬁnd something to quarrel with in the nature of his circumstances? For it is the condition of humanity that is never free from care, and that luck is never fully realized nor lasting and stable.”110 This announcement of a great theme, couched in an impersonal style, recalls the beginnings of the classicizing altercationes of the twelfth century, such as the Causa Aiacis et Ulixis 111 and arouses expectations of an exercise in the same genre. That expectation is thwarted. Bernardus was not employing Declamatio maior 4 to compose a debate-poem like the Causae or a verse paraphrase of pseudo-Quintilian’s prose like De gemellis. His aim was more ambitious. As alive to the rhetorical qualities of the Declamationes maiores as his contemporary Lawrence of Durham,112 Bernardus set out to exploit them in a manner that would establish his independence from his model. He did so, ﬁrst, by bringing to the fore the tragic quality of the theme of fortune and fate, which plays no more than a decorative role in Declamatio maior 4, and, second, by introducing into the Mathematicus a character who is absent from pseudo-Quintilian’s work: the wife and mother, whom he contrasts with the idealized ﬁgure of the father. A mere foil to the son in pseudo-Quintilian, he is presented by Bernardus as an embodiment of fortune’s blessings, in a style rich in parallelism and paronomasia which recalls the virtuoso effects of Hildebert’s panegyrics: There was a knight at Rome—a valiant warrior, wealthy, inﬂuential in the city, happily married, of distinguished family, eloquent, handsome, generous, and honorable.113

This same ideal, when applied to the mother, is measured by standards that are patently misogynistic: His wife was of equal standing and comparable character, no older than he, nor inferior to him in good repute, 109

“Semper ut ex aliqua felices parte querantur, / leges humanae conditionis habent” (vv.

I-2). 110 “Quis est enim tam compositae felicitatis, ut non aliqua ex parte cum status sui qualitate rixetur? Anxia enim res est humanorum conditio bonorum et quae vel numquam tota proveniat vel numquam perpetua subsistat.” 111 P. Schmidt, ed., MlJb 1 (1964), p. 100–132. 112 For the use of pseudo-Quintilian in the oratory of Lawrence of Durham, see U. Kindermann, “Die fünf Reden des Laurentius von Durham,” MlJb 6 (1973), pp. 108 – 41. 113 “Miles erat Romae, probus armis, rebus habundans, / Urbe potens, felix coniuge, clarus avis; / voce, manu, facie, facundus, largus, honestus.” Mathematicus, vv. 3– 5.

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obliging, modest, retiring—not, as beautiful women are often accustomed to be, domineering toward her husband. Opulence and luxury, although they lead to bad behavior, had no adverse effect on her upright character. Although in youth it is usual to be frivolous, this lovely and capable woman had no time for levity; she was beautiful and chaste—a virtue rarely combined with good looks— and generally still rarer still in the weaker sex. Fickleness, the vice of femininity, she shunned, avoiding the wicked misdeeds to which women incline, repressing shallow emotions and proving herself capable of forgetting the sex to which she belonged.114

Observe the length devoted, in Bernardus’s Latin, to praise of allegedly equivalent and corresponding qualities: four for the man’s, fourteen for the woman’s. Antithesis, periphrasis, and qualiﬁcation are employed to distinguish the individual virtues of the mother from the general vices of her sex. With a command of the misogynistic clichés which the verse of Hildebert and Marbod had brought to a pitch of urbane banality,115 Bernardus’s irony deepens into paradox when, later in the work, such criticisms of women are turned, by this exceptional woman, against herself. Fortune, the main subject of Hildebert’s Ovidian and Boethian commonplaces in De casu huius mundi,116 now makes its appearance. The childlessness of the couple (unmentioned in pseudo-Quintilian) is presented by Bernardus Silvestris both as imperfect felicity and, with the mixed feelings of a celibate cleric, as no disadvantage: Luck smiled on them, nature favored them, apart from the gift of children, they were blessed in every respect; imperfect only in this— if to lack offspring is less than perfect prosperity.117

Where Hildebert, in his fulminations on fortuna, rehearsed those Boethian topoi about her mutability which had long been part of Latin poetic koine, 114 “Sponsa viro non stirpe minor, non moribus impar, / non aevo senior dissimilisve ﬁde; / prompta, modesta, timens, non—ut solet esse frequenter— / imperiosa suo femina pulchra viro. / Luxus opum nocuos quamvis declivis ad actus, / non fecit mores degenerare bonos. / Cum soleat levitas iuvenilibus esse sub annis, / non leve gessit opus femina pulchra, potens; / pulchraque casta fuit, quae virtus, rara venustis, / in fragili sexu rarior esse solet. / Femineae vitium naturae, mobilitatem, / cavit et ingenitae crimina nequitiae,/ affectusque leves quadam sub mole reﬁxit, / et potuit sexus immemor esse sui.” (vv. 7–20) 115 Note the echo, at Mathematicus 20, of Hildebert’s Carm. 30, 6 (ed. Scott, p. 19): “et docuit sexum non meminisse sui.” 116 Scott, ed., pp. 11–15. 117 “Sors arrisit eis, favit natura: beati / omnibus, excepto munere prolis, erant; / perfecti minus hoc uno (si prole carere / est a perfecta prosperitate minus)” Mathematicus, vv. 23–26.

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Bernardus turned to a different, less familiar passage of the Philosophiae Consolatio (3, pr. 10) which discusses the perfect and the imperfect good, and employed its philosophical categories to establish distance from his characters, by suggesting that the progeny they desired might not be a blessing. In this dialectic between assertion and qualiﬁcation, between narrative and narrator, the Mathematicus begins to develop its distinctive ambiguity of tone: Its achievements and successes overshadowed, its good fortune made to seem a general bane, the couple laments, weeping ﬂoods of tears: for nature is not against them; nor is old age, sluggish and dull, an obstacle; nor can the wife complain that her husband’s ardor has cooled with age; nor he that she is frigid.118

The style is allusive, a double classical reference being concentrated into a single line (v. 31), the formulation is parenthetical, but the quadruple negative of vv. 31–34 does nothing to disguise the fact that Bernardus Silvestris, exponent of cosmic eroticism, here earthily suggests that the couple’s failure to procreate was not for want of trying. The wife consults an astrologer, who prophesies, with an ambiguity that he proceeds to deny, the birth of a parricide son: “What I have foretold has nothing ambiguous about it.”119

How equivocal this rebuttal of equivocality is to become, the rest of the poem will show; and it signals a mounting complexity in the rhetoric with which the husband and wife respond to the prophecy: She, about to bear a king for Rome and death for her husband, has sadness in her joy and sorrow in her happiness.120

To this quandary, the father responds in a style that is quintessentially Ovidian: “Do not hesitate to kill your boy! If you allow him to survive and me to die, this piety will be a kind of impiety.”121

118 “Successus alios, alios obscurat honores / fortunamque facit omnibus esse ream. / Flentque dolentque magis; nec enim natura repugnat [v. 31], / nec gravitas aevi languidioris obest, / nec senis haec gelidos causari coniugis annos, / ille nec uxoris frigida membra potest” (vv. 29–34). With v. 31 cf. Ovid, Fasti 2. 822 and Juvenal 1. 79. 119 “‘Quidquid praecinui nil habet ambigui’” (v. 60). 120 “Roma, tibi regem mortem paritura marito / tristitiam gaudens, gaudia tristis habet” (vv. 65–66). 121 “Ne dubites puerum mortiﬁcare tuum! / Si patiaris eum superesse, mihi morituro / haec pietas species impietatis erit” (vv. 80 – 82).

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To appreciate the allusive context in which this paradox appears, consider the narrative that follows: He ended this speech. They wept together. Without delay, the following night, they slept together; she conceived and her belly swelled. After the months laid down by nature’s laws, she gave birth at the due time. In the newborn child there was such a divine likeness that it was hard to believe he was made of ﬂesh and blood. As a wife, she was attached to her husband; as a mother, she felt for her son and was thus in a quandary as to whom she should spare. The boy, in his blond beauty, could not but be loved; he softened his mother’s heart and prevented her from cruelty. With a lovely smile at his distraught parent, he was like one begging not to be put to death. At the sight of him, entreaties had no force; the grace of her handsome child driving her beloved husband from her mind. And as she prepared to play Medea’s role, she learned the meaning of maternal love.122

Within the space of a single two lines (vv. 83–84), the couple moves from the conclusion of a speech, through grief and intercourse, to her conception and pregnancy. A handful of verses later, the mother has given birth to a miraculous child whose messianic qualities are not only stated in vv. 87–88 but also underlined by the echo, in v. 93, of Virgil, Eclogue 4.62. And within two more couplets, she is experiencing the division of feelings that Bernardus imitated from the poetry of Ovid.123 Ovid contributed not only a style but also an imaginative situation—that of Althea in Metamorphoses 8.445ff., which is echoed in this passage. Conﬂicting loyalties, leading to the assumption of two contrary roles, are depicted by Ovid in his account of Althea’s anguish about whether to burn the log on which her son Meleager’s life depends and so avenge her brothers whom he has killed.124 Like his ancient model, Bernardus thinks in 122 “Finierat. Flevere simul. Mora nulla sequenti / Nocte iacent pariter; concipit illa; tumet. / Maternos menses naturae legibus implens / Edidit ad numeri tempora certa sui. / In nascente fuit tantae deitatis imago, / Vix potuit credi materialis homo. / Nupta virum, mater puerum dum diligit, haeret [v. 89], / Et dubitat puero parcere sive viro. / Formosus niveusque puer se cogit amari, / Et matrem mollit et vetat esse feram. / Pulcher et iratae visus ridere parenti [v. 93]; / Oranti similis, ne moreretur, erat. / Ad speciem periere preces, discussit amatum / Formosae sobolis gratia mente virum. / Quae nunc esse suae soboli Medea parabat, / Cepit maternus scire quid esset amor” (vv. 83 – 98). 123 On Bernardus’s other debts to Seneca, cf. O. Zwierlein, “Spuren der Tragödien Senecas bei Bernardus Silvestris, Petrus Pictor und Marbod von Rennes,” MlJb 22 (1989), pp. 171–79. 124 With vv. 89ff. and 82 above, compare Ovid: “ . . . pugnat materque sororque/ et diversa trahunt unum duo nomina pectus,” Metamorphoses 8. 463 – 64 and “impietate pia est . . . ,” ibid., 8. 477.

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terms of descriptive vignettes, “cinematically” presented.125 Pace is varied by syntax: its structure, at vv. 83–84, inviting rapid reading; at vv. 89ff. compelling us to dwell on antitheses of expression and contrasts of emotions. What engaged Bernardus’s interest in the Metamorphoses was the art of pathos, grandiloquently expressed, at which Ovid excelled. But Bernardus never attempts those “set-pieces of enargeia”126 that constitute such a debated feature of the Metamorphoses. His concern was with passages in which Ovid describes division of feelings, such as Althea’s dilemma at Metamorphoses 8, where the ancient master of verbal point strains it to its limits—strain not in the eyes of those rhetorical mannerists, Hildebert and Marbod, for whom no artiﬁce could be too elaborate, no topos too commonplace; strain, rather, in terms of the esthetics of Bernardus’s commentary on Virgil. They are developed, in his Mathematicus, by the magniﬁcation of Ovid’s rhetoric to ironical excess. How and why, are questions that now need to be addressed. The wife, disobeying her husband’s command to kill their child, sends him away to foster-parents. This motif, inherited from his source, is fused with Bernardus’s novel theme of ambiguity: His name was ambiguous: but his mother, with cunning secrecy had him called Patricida, so that, when he became a young man, he would be shocked, on hearing his name repeated, at the terrible violence to which it pointed.127

An etymological principle is questioned in these verses. The hero of Bernardus’s poem is not called Patricida because ex re nomen habet:128 that is what is at issue in the Mathematicus, and what remains unresolved. But by adducing, in this deceptively innocent form, Isidore’s correspondence between verba and res, Bernardus begins to cast doubt upon a fundamental axiom of etymology. It is a doubt that develops into a scepticism, the consequences of which reach to the core of the poem, as Patricida, a puer senex, becomes expert in the seven liberal arts. Here too the description of his achievement has a double-edged quality. For if he is invested with the attributes of compre125 On the cinematic character of the Metamorphoses, see E. J. Kenney, “The Style of the Metamorphoses,” in Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns ( (London, 1972), pp. 141ff. 126 Ibid., p. 143. 127 “Nomen in ambiguo; sed ‘Patricida’ vocetur / imperat arcana calliditate parens, / Ut iuvenis tantumque nefas tantumque furorem / Horreat audito nomine saepe suo” Mathematicus, vv. 107–10. 128 J. Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’ Espagne wisigotique 1, 2 ed. (Paris, 1983), pp. 40ff. and R. Klinck, Die lateinische Etymologie des Mittelalters (Munich, 1970).

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hensive learning, special emphasis is laid on the terseness of Patricida’s rhetorical style129 —in contrast to the ﬂamboyant rhetoric exaggerated in the Mathematicus itself—and on his command of astrology.130 The attribution of this second skill is less conventional and more ironical than has been thought.131 In Declamatio maior 4 the confused victim of the astrologer’s prophecies, Patricida becomes, in the Mathematicus, the master of his art. That achievement is complemented by the military prowess of a hero who is now represented, in the manner of Virgil’s Aeneas, as the darling of fate,132 and now as the conqueror of Carthage, a surrogate Scipio. Yet that exemplum of ancient virtue133 provided only one standard of comparison, for Patricida is described as a beneﬁciary of fortune in terms as trite as Hildebert’s in De casu huius mundi.134 Suggesting the precariousness of an achievement that depends on fortune’s favor, Bernardus asserts the absolute merits of Patricida. In this oscillating perspective, the suspicion is evoked that the successes, even of an ideal hero, are not assured. That suspicion is conﬁrmed in the scene that follows, where the mounting emphasis on ambiguity reaches its climax. Rome, at the time of the Punic wars from which Patricida emerges as victor, had a king, according to the deliberate anachronism of the Mathematicus.135 Proﬁting from the spoils of his general’s victory, this “lord of the booty which he had done nothing to gain” (v. 198) writes to the senate demanding a triumph. Divided between indignation at the groundlessness of his claim and their dread of his wrath (v. 210), they reply with a letter: 129 “Rhetoricosque volens non ignorare colores, / Succincte didicit perspicuumque loqui . . .” (vv. 129 –30). 130 “Novit enim quam sideribus, quam primitus orbi / sementem dederit materiamque deus; . . . / Astra quibus spatiis distent septena planetae, / Mensus utrosque polos, mensus utrumque mare, / Astrorumque vias humanaque fata sub astris, / Et fesso caelos Hercule sustinuit . . .” (vv. 117–18; 125 –28). 131 Stock, Myth and Science, p. 206 and n. 85. 132 “Comprobat hic vires Jupiter ipse suas; / Et quia sic ﬁeri fatalis postulat ordo, / Hanc sibi regnandi fata dedere viam” (vv. 150 – 52). Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 10. 111–12. 133 See H. Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism, in The Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950), p. 70. 134 “Ridiculos hominum versat sors caeca labores: / Saecula nostra iocus ludibriumque deis. / Conversis vicibus iacet Africa, Roma triumphat, / Victores victos extimuere suos; / Et tanquam timeat Romam sacer ordo deorum, / Protinus et celeri damna levavit ope. / Sic igitur potuit veniam Fortuna mereri, / Dum dedit eventus post mala fata bonos.” Mathematicus, vv. 175 –82. Cf. Hildebert, Carm. 22, 27ff. 135 For P. Dronke (Fabula, Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte IX [London, 1985], p. 129), “the heady disregard of chronological perspective” which “stress[es] the fabulous quality of his setting.” On medieval images of Republican Rome, see Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism, p. 82.

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Pagina signatur, cuius “dare” sive “negare” Ambiguus sensus signiﬁcare queat: “Nullius obsistit meritis, servire parata [v. 213] Semper victori regia Roma suo; Nam cui laurigeros meruit victoria currus, Non illi meritos Roma negabit eos. Qui populos vicit Carthaginis, ille,” fatemur, “Ille triumphales scandere debet equos.”136

Observe how the philosophical theme of the Mathematicus is exempliﬁed in its verse: the expansive nullius of v. 213 balanced (and restricted) by meritis; the generalized pledge of loyalty qualiﬁed by the precise victori . . . suo (v. 214), the double negative of v. 216, retracting the offer it seems to make; its illi echoed in vv. 217 and 218—neither excluding the addressee of the letter nor addressing him as its subject. “To him, the victor, the triumph is due” runs the senate’s equivocal rhetoric, “but not”—implicitly—“to you.” What course but abdication now lay open to the shunned sovereign? With a morose reference to fortune’s favor and the benevolence of the stars, the king yields to the force majeure of ambiguity: I feel the double force of these equivocal words

says137

he and relinquishes the crown. Patricida’s mother, previously in anguish at the conﬂict between her maternal instincts and her husband’s command to kill their son, is now tormented by his ascent to the throne which seems to conﬁrm the astrologer’s prophecy: Her breast, ﬁlled with joy at the welcome success yielded place to the claims of grievous worries.138

Again, in this parallel scene of suffering, the language is Ovidian: And as the bond of love for her husband and partner, the uprightness of their lives and unblemished ﬁdelity occurred to her, she wished that she had not given birth; her son and his power displeased her and she ceased entirely to be a mother.139

136

“Royal Rome stands in the way of no one’s achievements and is always ready to serve a victor. For she will not deny a chariot crowned with laurels to him who has deserved it by his victory. He, we say, who conquered Carthage has the right to mount the steeds of triumph.” (vv. 213–18). 137 “Ambagem dubiae sentio vocis,” ait (v. 224). 138 “Pectora iocundis successibus exhilarata / Vindicat hospitium cura dolorque sibi” (vv. 283–84). 139 “Cumque subit socialis amor foedusque maritum, / Integritas vitae nec violata ﬁdes, / Non peperisse velit; natus natique potestas / Displicet et prorsus desinit esse parens” (vv. 287–90). With v. 284 cf. Metamorphoses 10. 75; with v. 287 cf. Metamorphoses 7. 800; and with v. 289–90 cf. the pseudo-Ovidian Nux, 24 –25.

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And the effect of this rhetoric of self-division is to engender further doubt—not only about the mother’s battle of emotions but also about the narrator’s view of them. When her wish, couched in the hypothetical subjunctive, to take her husband’s place is contradicted by an indicative deﬁning the dictates of fate: Were she able to avert the timeless course of fate, she should wish to die instead of her husband. But sad Lachesis and inexorable destiny have no choice but to follow preordained paths.140

—does that indicative represent the impartial voice of the narrator or a further scruple in the mother’s distraught mind? The style, like the sentiments, is equivocal, leaving the reader and the characters of the Mathematicus in suspense. Suspense is the means by which Bernardus goes on to demonstrate the ambivalence of moral rhetoric. Accusing herself, the mother echoes and ampliﬁes the misogynistic clichés with which her virtue was antithetically described earlier in the poem. First, she upbraids Nature for the bane of her birth and her sex: “There are grounds,” she said, “for my criticism of you, Nature the creator, for you never impose the ﬁnishing touch on anything; although your gifts are generous, they are wanting, because I was born a woman. In this respect you lack good will toward me; mine is the sex that is opposed to simplicity.”141

Then, in the manner of Hildebert and Marbod,142 she launches into a lengthy attack on women: “If the gods please, let the wicked race of women be destroyed, and men then live alone in their world. . . . Women have nothing other than the root of sin in them, and the substance that sows evil. Were the times of ancient simplicity to return and the spirit of quick wit to decline, a woman would sufﬁce to restore the arts that do harm.”143 140 “Si queat aeterno Parcas prevertere cursu, / Vellet pro domino fata subire suo. / Sed tristis Lachesis, sed inexorabile fatum, / Non nisi praescriptas ius habet ire vias” (vv. 297– 300). 141 “‘Est,’ ait, ‘unde querar de te, Natura creatrix, / Quae nihil ad summam perﬁcis usque manum. / Multa licet dederis, minus est, quod femina nascor, / Defecitque tuus hac mihi parte favor. / Is meus est sexus cui simplicitas inimica . . .’” (vv. 321–25). 142 Hildebert, Carm. 50, 3, 5, 7, etc. (Scott, ed., p. 40); Marbod 3, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, (Leotta, ed., p. 101– 3). 143 “‘Si libeat superis, genus evertatur iniquum / Femina, vivat homo tum suus orbe suo . . . Femina non aliter radicem criminis in se / Sementemque mali materiamque tenet. / Tem-

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As this antifeminist rhetoric employed in the self-accusation of a virtuous woman acquires a two-edged quality, so the technique of protracted suspense is turned against itself. Forty-four lines into her speech, it is still not clear what the mother is driving at; and even she is taken aback by her verbosity: “But since you are held in suspense by my ambiguous speech, this is the purpose of my words, this is what they mean.”144

This self-rebuke is not, however, sufﬁcient to stem her ﬂow, and she now launches into a catalog of her son’s successes, marked by the same repetitive parallelism: That son of yours, whose sharp reasoning and deeds you admire, whose words you often approve; that son of yours, whom the entire world with its seven regions extols; that son of yours, about whom hostile envy and fame itself are afraid to lie . . . that son of yours, whom you see enthroned and ruling with the scepter of majesty in his grasp . . . In each and every respect you see fulﬁlled the words of the astrologer as he predicted, nisi quod tua fata supersunt.145

But here the conclusion is ambiguous, for nisi quod tua fata supersunt (v. 393) means both “except that your fate remains to be settled” and “except that you are alive.” Ambiguity, Bernardus wittily suggests, is at times indistinguishable from tactlessness. Whether motivated by altruism or stung by the equivocality of her words, the husband answers: “Were you to be silent, Nature herself would speak for you: your orators are justice and piety. You do not need to adopt artiﬁcial rhetoric.”146

How hypothetical the subjunctive sileas is at v. 413 of the husband’s speech is deﬁned by the preceding wordiness of the wife, while the repudiation of pora si redeant antiquae simplicitatis, / Argutique cadat spiritus ingenii, / Femina sufﬁciet artes reparare nocendi . . .’” (vv. 329 – 30, 335 – 39). 144 “‘Sed, quia suspensus dubio sermone teneris, / accipe quo tendant, quid mea verba velint’” (vv. 367– 68). 145 “‘Filius ille tuus, cuius rationis acumen, / Actus mirari, verba probare soles; / Filius ille tuus, quem praedicat orbis et omnis / Quae sub septeno climate terra iacet; / Filius ille tuus, de quo quoque livor et hostis, / De quo mentiri Fama vel ipsa timet . . . / Filius ille tuus, quem regni sede locatum / Cernis honorata sceptra tenere manu. / Verba mathematici, nisi quod tua fata supersunt, / Omnia decreto ﬁne peracta vides . . .’” (vv. 381– 86, 391– 94). Cf. Horace, Odes 3.9.12. 146 “‘Ipsa, licet sileas, pro te Natura loquetur: / Sunt oratores iusque piumque tui. / Non tibi rhetoricos opus induxisse colores . . .’” (vv. 413 –15).

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rhetorical colores, after this tirade of contradictory eloquence, acquires a subversive irony. To the self-criticism in the speech of his wife, the husband replies by likening himself to a tree that will live on its twigs (vv. 425ff.), his pain to happiness (v. 427), his death to immortality (vv. 437ff.). Accusation is balanced by resignation, self-censure by self-effacement; and the effect of this argument by contraries is to make rhetoric into a medium of assertion through denial. For where does morality lie when the mother’s “vice” derives from her maternal virtue? What criteria render ethically admirable the father’s acceptance of his arbitrary fate? These are the questions Bernardus poses and, in formulating them, he was guided by the pseudo-Quintilian’s model of elaborate but muddled rhetoric misused by anonymous protagonists intelligible only through their roles. The conﬂict of those roles with the oratory that distorts them in Declamatio maior 4 becomes a profounder issue in the Mathematicus, when Bernardus links both, with a sophistication absent from his source, to the issue of public and private identities. Patricida’s parents approach him while, seated in majesty, he dispenses the laws (vv. 453 –56). His responsibility in the public sphere matched by his dutifulness in the private, Patricida rises at the sight of his mother and displays a double pietas: The pomp and majesty of empire cast aside, he does full obeisance to his mother.147

On this pietas she plays, separating and opposing his obligations as son and as king: “Let Rome take care of itself, reliant on its own strength, let it learn, for once, to do without its king! This I entreat and command; entreating my king and commanding my son; a mother, well disposed, has he rights over her child!”148

Here the antithetical style Bernardus favors throughout the Mathematicus acquires fresh meaning, and one of his divergences from pseudo-Quintilian emerges clearly. It is crucial to the rhetorical drama that Bernardus develops from (and, in part, against) the fourth of the Declamationes maiores that the son is not a private citizen but a ruler, distinguished by his services to the state. For the rhetorical theory that animates much of Bernardus’s interpretation of the Aeneid and that forms a central subject of the com147

“Imperii fastu vel majestate reiecta, / Totus maternis subditur obsequiis” (vv. 465 –

66). 148 “‘Roma sibi vigilet, propriis quoque viribus usa, / Interdum discat rege carere suo! / Hoc precor, hoc iubeo; regem precor, impero nato; / Ius habet in partus mater amica suos!’” (vv. 477–80).

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mentary on Cicero’s De inventione written by Thierry of Chartres, dedicatee of the Cosmographia, expresses a political doctrine of the civic utility of eloquentia and sapientia. When the mother, in the Mathematicus, employs rhetoric to contrast the public and private roles of Patricida, as king and as son, she introduces a problem for the theory that Thierry and Bernardus elsewhere advance without qualiﬁcation. For if moral rhetoric can be used to assert the primacy of personal over civic concerns, how is the union of eloquentia and sapientia to be maintained? That question, posed but unanswered at this turning-point of the poem, is solved only at its conclusion. The mother, presenting his father to their son, praises him as a pattern of all the virtues (vv. 439ff.). The father, more hesitant, dwells on the conﬂict of identities: “Son—but perhaps I abuse the name of father— he who is cruel ceases to be one. Son, I say nonetheless . . .”149

Within this conﬂict he is the helpless dupe of astral determinism, and his eloquence attempts vainly to distinguish between guilt and blame: “Do not lend your hand or mind, my son, to this savage deed; in a different spirit take hold of your sword. Through the power of the ﬁrmament and heavenly motions of the divine stars you are forced to do harm; if you are forced to do harm, it is through the manifest fault of the gods that you cannot be gentler to your father.”150

The insufﬁciency of such rhetoric to grapple with the problem confronting the father is revealed by the knots into which he ties himself while trying to deﬁne the concept of harm without responsibility: “You are not a criminal, my son, nor do I think you one, he who is unable not to do harm, does so.”151

What does this convolution of alliterating negatives mean? Nothing coherent, at the level of reasoned argument; but much at the level of rhetoric— or, rather, of rhetoric’s misuse. The father is in a quandary which cannot 149 “‘Nate—sed usurpo nomen fortasse paternum— / Qui saevus pater est, desinit esse pater / Nate, fatebor enim . . .’” (vv. 535 – 37). 150 “‘Dextram, non animum praebebis, nate, furori; / Qui tua tela regat spiritus alter erit. / Vi ﬁrmamenti divinorumque supernis / casibus astrorum cogeris esse nocens; / Cogeris esse nocens manifestaque culpa deorum / Est, ubi non possis mitior esse patri’” (vv. 581– 86). 151 “‘Tu neque, nate, nocens, nec enim reor esse nocentem: / Qui, quia non potuit non nocuisse, nocet’” (vv. 589 – 90).

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be solved by his separation of respectus from res. Attempting to resurrect the etymological principle mentioned earlier, he exposes its emptiness: “Not without reference but without substance you are called Patricida; wait to see the meaning of your name.”152

With this exempliﬁcation of the fallaciae that Bernardus’s commentary on Virgil discusses,153 the Mathematicus demonstrates how polyvalency can amount to paradox. And at that dramatic moment, the father’s rhetoric collapses. Worn down by the weight of his distinctions without difference, he lapses into muteness: “I forgive you, my son. . . .” Although he wanted to say “my death,” the word would not come to his tongue.154

Like the nymph Egeria who, at Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15.549, literally liqueﬁes, Patricida’s father “dissolves in tears.”155 The unenviable son is thus confronted not only with a rediscovered parent whom he is predestined to kill, but also with a convinced, if confused, exponent of astral determinism whose language mirrors, in its comic contortions, the torment of his mind. What response can Patricida make to this existential dilemma that taxes the limits of rhetoric? Its insufﬁciency had been demonstrated by the struggle of his father to wring from the ordinary topoi of self-sacriﬁce an answer to this extraordinary problem. He had failed. A new idiom was needed and it is created, with unforeseen results, in the soliloquy by Patricida which follows. He ﬁrst thinks in terms of fortuna—both personal success or misfortune and the personiﬁcation that, throughout the Mathematicus, plays a prominent role (vv. 613–14, 627–28). Yet those terms are inadequate to face the situation before him and, in a macabre variant on Ovid’s Liebestod (Amores 1.10.39), he resolves to commit suicide (vv. 633–34). Rejecting the categories, of the stars and of fate, upon which his plight has been premised, he goes on to sever the bond between res and verba, the tenuousness of which the earlier part of the poem has demonstrated: “If it were lawful to deceive the stars and elude the fates, I should forestall the death to which my father is predestined,” he said. “Rome shall see that I am called Patricida but am not one, and that the meaning of this name is deceptive.”156 152 “‘Non sine respectu, sine re Patricida vocaris; / Nominis attendas signiﬁcata tui’” (vv. 591–92). 153 See above, p. 236. 154 “‘Condono mea, nate, tibi’ . . . Cum dicere vellet / ‘Funera,’ vox linguam nulla secuta suam” (vv. 593 – 94). 155 “liquitur in lacrimas . . .” (v. 597). 156 “‘Si fas sideribus, si fas illudere Parcis, / Fata necemque patris praeveniemus,’ ait. /

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Yet in likening the illusory power of the stars and fate to the deceptiveness of etymology, Patricida introduces new but equally ambiguous terms of his own: “Why are our minds akin to the stars in heaven, if they must endure the grim dictates of pitiless Lachesis? In vain do we possess a tiny part of God’s plan, if our reason is incapable of deciding for itself. God created the elements and the ﬁery stars in such a manner that man should not be subject to them; he was given a higher degree of pure intelligence in order to avert the evils in his path.”157

Employing an antideterminist argument he found in the Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus,158 Patricida goes on to argue a different case based on the Asclepius.159 From this work of “later Hermeticism, with its insistence on the soul’s need to transcend the realm of Fate . . . ,”160 Bernardus drew the central idea of an afﬁnity between human beings and nature, between human ratio and the mens divina,161 which he linked with a limitation of stellar inﬂuence in a form comparable to that of William of Conches in his commentaries on the Timaeus and on the Philosophiae Consolatio.162 Naturally the allusive diction of this passage invites comparison with other models—with the Timaeus itself (47 b-c)163 and with Stoic intermediaries,

‘Roma Patricidam dici, non esse videbit— / Et mendax sensus nominis huius erit’” (vv. 635 – 38). 157 “‘Nostra quid aethereis mens est cognatior astris, / Si durae Lachesis triste necesse ferat? / Frustra particulam divinae mentis habemus, / Si nequeat ratio nostra cavere sibi. / Sic elementa deus, sic ignea sidera fecit, / ut neque sideribus subditus esset homo; / sed puri datur ingenii solertia maior, / Possit ut obiectis obvius ire malis’” (vv. 639 – 46). 158 The “Cosmographia” of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. W. Wetherbee (New York, 1973), p. 27. Wetherbee adduces Mathesis, ed. W. Kroll and F. Skutsch (reprint Stuttgart, 1968) 1, 2, 7–12 and 1, 4, 4 but cf. too Mathesis 1, 5, 12 (cum simus cum stellis quadem cognatione coniuncti). 159 W. Wetherbee, The “Cosmographia” of Bernardus Silvestris, pp. 32ff.; R. B. Woolsey, “Bernard Silvester and the Hermetic Asclepius,” Traditio 6 (1948), pp. 340 – 44; Dronke, ed., Cosmographia, pp. 17ff. 160 G. Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes. A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge, 1986), p. 78. 161 Cf. Asclepius, ed. A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, in Corpus Hermeticum 2a (Paris, 1983), 1 (p. 295, 12–13), 3 (p. 298, 21–22), 4 (p. 299, 19); 6 (p. 303, 5–10); and 11 (p. 309, 17–21). 162 Jeauneau, ed., Glosae super Platonem, pp. 128–30 and C. Jourdain in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale 20.2 (Paris, 1862), p. 77: “Anima posita est super stellas, quia per rationem anime transcendit homo stellas.” 163 J. H. Waszink, ed., 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1975), p. 44, 17ff.

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above all Macrobius,164 but also, perhaps, Cicero (not only in his Somnium Scipionis but also in his translation of Timaeus 32, where every living thing is quasi particula quaedam of a divine mens 165) and Seneca.166 Yet the syncretism of Bernardus’s language should not conceal the individuality of his thought. At the point in the twelfth century when Timaean “physics” combined with Stoic and hermetic elements to produce a distinctive view of the cosmos as a living and uniﬁed organism,167 Bernardus turned this concept of the harmony of nature against the malignant inﬂuence ascribed to the stars, while preserving, in Patricida’s invocation of the force that unites the universe, the ambiguity of a vocabulary that could be both Christian and pagan. Appealing to “ratio—that logos in which consists the divinity of the world . . . parts of which are present in humans as their reason,”168 Patricida recalls the Stoic sage, whose projected suicide is justiﬁed by his understanding of cosmic rationality,169 and evokes the Christian hero. And when he goes on to present his case to the Roman people, it is in his anachronistic part as a king of Republican Rome. Patricida’s public role now comes to the fore, and in Ovidian style he is described mounting the throne: Then he proceeded to the Capitoline hill, seat of government, by which the Tiber ﬂows, and sat on the noble ivory throne.170

The allusion here is to the wise rule of Sextus Pompeius, depicted at Ovid’s Ex Ponto 4.5.17–18; its point lies in the reminder of the just and benevolent character of Patricida’s kingship—at the very moment when it is about to come to an end. The proclamation of Patricida’s majesty is qualiﬁed by the evasiveness with which he outlines the dilemma he fears: He rises from the throne and, with a regal gesture, commands silence and then speaks: “Sons of Iulus, children of Mars, Romans, —from the one, long ago, you derived your name, from the other your race— 164 Macrobius, In “somnium Scipionis,” 1, 14, 2– 3, 4, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1970), p. 55– 56: “. . . tantam humano generi divinitatem inesse testatur, ut universos siderei animi cognatione nobilitet . . . cum ergo dicit [Cicero] ‘hisque animus datus est ex illis sempiternis ignibus’ mentem praestat intelligi, quae nobis proprie cum caelo sideribusque communis est.” 165 W. Ax, ed. (Stuttgart, 1978), p. 160b. Cf. too De natura deorum 2. 37. 166 Ep. 66, 12, ed. L. Reynolds (Oxford, 1965), p. 183, 26 –27. 167 See T. Gregory, “L’idea di natura nella ﬁlosoﬁa medievale prima dell’ingresso della ﬁsica di Aristotele—il secolo xii,” in id., Mundana sapientia, pp. 77–114, esp. 102ff. 168 M. Grifﬁn, Seneca. A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford, 1976), p. 374. 169 See Y. Grisé, Le Suicide dans la Rome antique (Paris, 1982), p. 201 and M. Grifﬁn, “Philosophy, Cato and Roman Suicide,” Greece and Rome 33 (1986), pp. 64ff., 188ff. 170 “Hinc Capitolinas, quibus inﬂuit Albula, sedes / venit et imperii nobile pressit ebur.” Mathematicus, vv. 647– 48.

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learn what your Patricida wishes and intends. I shall not hold you long in suspense. He asks for an ambiguous, nameless gift; whatever it may be, Rome, grant it to your king. Although the issue (quaestio) is doubtful, dubious, and hesitant, it contains nothing deceptive.”171

The demand becomes a refrain, insistently repeated in the rest of Patricida’s speech. With a disavowal of fallaciae, Patricida launches into ﬁfty lines of circumlocutionary eloquence that leaves his audience no wiser, at the end, as to the aim of his appeal. Its sophistical form, indicated by the scholastic term quaestio applied to it twice at v. 668, exposes the redundancy of its content: “I should have thought that the gift was in large part obtained by the match of style and ﬂattering words. It is demeaning, among friends, to hesitate about gifts, and delay in giving is no venal offense.”172

Left in suspense by a device Patricida denied he would use, his people know only that their ruler is requesting a munus. All else is shrouded in obscurity. And at this moment of doubt, Patricida attributes to himself—to his own will and reason—the godlike powers previously assigned by his father to fate: He felt everything going according to his will173

is the ﬁrst step in this identiﬁcation; the second is his claim: “My reason cannot forget its purpose, nor be moved from its objective; it remains resolved.”174

Juxtaposed with this assertion of immovable will is a new deﬁnition of its freedom, for Patricida not only demands libertas mortis suae (v. 746) but also construes it as a means of resolving the conﬂict between his public role and his private identity: “The commander whom you created, Rome, in your own interests, to whom you gave the right to legislate for the public good, wishes to have the freedom to take his life, 171 “Erigitur de sede throni monstratque silendum / maiestate manus; denique verba facit:/ “Sanguis Iulaeus, soboles Gradiva, Quirites, / —Hinc olim vires ducitis, inde genus, — / Noscite — nec dubios suspensa mente tenebo — / Quid moveat, vester quid Patricida velit. / Postulat ambiguum, sublato nomine, munus; / Quidquid id est, regi porrige, Roma, tuo./ Suspectam timidamque licet se praebeat anceps / Quaestio, nil anceps quaestio fraudis habet” (vv. 659–68). 172 “‘Crediderim munus magna pro parte coemptum, / Cum color et vultus blandaque lingua rogat. / Turpe super donis dubitabitur inter amicos, / et mora donandi non leve crimen habet . . .’” (vv. 693 – 96). 173 “Sensit et arbitrio cuncta venire suo” (v. 726). 174 “Proposito descire suo coeptisque moveri / Nostra nequit ratio, sed sibi ﬁxa manet” (vv. 753–54).

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providing that the people and senate grant it, The gift that I ask from you, Rome, is my death.”175

Here, at the moment where the mysterious munus seems to be unveiled, the language in which Bernardus’s hero proclaims his freedom suggests its exact contrary. For Patricida, the master and the victim of ambiguity, has couched what has been interpreted as an afﬁrmation of freedom to kill himself 176 in the originally Neoplatonic terms the Medieval Latin tradition employed to reject suicide. The connection Patricida draws between induperator and munus is one that Cicero (both in the Somnium Scipionis and in De senectute), Ambrose, Augustine, and others had forged into a military metaphor of the guardpost, where the human soul receives from God, his imperator (or, in John of Salisbury’s variant, his dux vel princeps), the task (munus) of maintaining watch.177 Desertion is prohibited. Suicide is ruled out. That position was gainsayed by none of Bernardus’s contemporaries who discussed this problem, using the same metaphor.178 Moreover, by insisting on his regal authority and by likening his resolve to the dictates of fate, this ruler demanding the munus of his life was claiming powers analogous to those which, for the audience of the Mathematicus, God exercised over the soul and denied to humanity. What the pagan hero of the poem could only perceive in positive and literal terms, its readers could not but interpret ﬁguratively and negatively. Hence the tragic pathos of Patricida’s ambiguous appeal, unwittingly cast in language that subverts itself. Subverted (not for the ﬁrst time) by his own rhetoric, this virtuous heathen completes his apostrophe to Rome in a diction heavy with Christian connotations: “The gift that I ask from you, Rome, is my death, you sin in ignorance and a cloud of unknowing befouls your deed.”179 175 “‘Induperatorem quem tu tibi, Roma, crearas, / cui dederas populi publica iura tui, / non nisi vel populo vel concedente senatu, / vult libertatem mortis habere suae. / Munus, Roma, tuum mors est mea’” (vv. 743 – 47). 176 Dronke, Fabula, p. 138. 177 See P. Courcelle, “La Postérité chrétienne du ‘Songe de Scipion,’” Revue des études latines 36 (1958), p. 224 and especially pp. 227 and 229. 178 See A. Bayet, Le Suicide et la morale (Paris, 1922), pp. 423ff. and, more generally, F. P. Knapp, Der Selbstmord in der abendländischen Epik des Hochmittelalters (Heidelberg, 1979), pp. 53ff.; N. Ohler, Sterben und Tod im Mittelalter (Munich, 1990), pp. 211ff.; Lapidge, “The Stoic Inheritance,” in Cambridge History, p. 95; A. Hüttig, Macrobius im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Commentarii in “Somnium Scipionis” (Freiburg, 1990), p. 92 and the discussion of Walter of St. Victor’s censure of suicide (“Contra quatuor labyrinthos Franciae,” ed. Glorieux) by K.-D. Nothdurft, Studien zum Einﬂuss Senecas auf die Philosophie und Theologie des zwölften Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 1963), pp. 78–80. 179 “‘Munus, Roma, tuum mors est mea, nescia peccas / Defenditque tuum nubilus error opus’” (vv. 747–48).

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The charge of a sin (peccatum) unwittingly committed that Patricida levels against his people is one that applies to himself, and the “cloud of unknowing” (nubilus error) of this innocent transgressor is deepened by the Neoplatonic vocabulary that he again employs, unaware of its Christian overtones. An image of suicide by the sword (vv. 775–76) is transmuted into one of liberation from the prison of the body180 —ﬁrst through a renewed assertion of Patricida’s afﬁnity with the stars that menace his fate, then by an evocation of primary causes (linked, in Boethian language, with spiritual revelation),181 until his mens ﬁnds freedom in the security of its merita: “And so my mind, born in heaven and akin to the stars, remembers its nature and its origin; and because this daughter of splendor understands the purity of its birth and beginning, it abhors the works of night. It abhors the works of night, capable of lofty reason and fears, as a spirit, to descend to the instability of the ﬂesh; nor shall my mind be so enslaved to carnal evil, losing its sense and its shame to the point that it shatters the untarnished vessel of its heart, noble in its uprightness, or allows guilty sloth to sap its strict resolve. 793 Therefore, while I have a holy mind in a holy body, and no reason to complain about the condition of the ﬂesh, let my vital companion, my heavenly radiance leave its muddy dwelling and carnal shadows; let the earthly ﬂesh return to earth; the ﬁery mind to the ﬁre; each part to its own kind. My mind, secure in its achievements, has no fear to leave the dull conﬁnes of the hateful body.”182

At one level, Patricida strives for release in language compatible with Christian redemption—an effort reﬂected not only in the Neoplatonic terms he 180 Cf. Macrobius, In “somnium Scipionis” 1, 13, 4ff., ed. Willis, p. 56, with P. Courcelle, “Tradition platonicienne et traditions chrétiennes du corps-prison (Phédon 62b; Cratyle 400c),” Revue des études latines 43 (1965), pp. 406ff., especially p. 439. Cf. id., “L’Âme en cage,” in Parusia. Studien zur Philosophie Platons und zur Problemgeschichte des Platonismus. Festgabe für J. Hirschberger (Frankfurt, 1965), pp. 103–16; J. Préaux, “Caeli civis,” in Hommage à J. Heurgon. L’Italie préromaine et la Rome républicaine (Rome, 1976), pp. 826 – 43 and P. Delhaye, Le Microcosmos de Godefroy de Saint-Victor (Lille, 1957), pp. 56 – 57. 181 With vv. 785 – 87, cf. Consolatio Philosophiae 3, metr. 9, 25 –26, ed. Bieler, p. 52. 182 “‘Et mea mens oriunda polo cognataque stellis / Naturae memor est principiique sui;/ Et quia primores puros intelligit ortus / Filia splendoris, noctis abhorret opus. / Noctis abhorret opus altaeque capax rationis / Spiritus ad carnis ﬂuxa venire timet; / Nec mea sic carni mens ancillatur iniquae, / Nec sic descivit depuduitque semel, / Frangat ut incoctum generoso pectus honesto, / Vel rigidos sensus culpa resolvat iners. / Ergo dum sancto mens est in corpore sancta, [793] / Nilque super carnis conditione gemit, / Recedat luteaque domo carnisque tenebris / Viviﬁcusque comes aethereumque iubar. / In terram terrena caro, mens ignis ad ignem, / Ad speciem redeat portio quaeque suam. / Corporis invisi caecis excedere claustris / Non trepidat meritis mens mea tuta suis’” (vv. 783 – 800).

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employs but also, on a simpler stylistic plane, by his adaptation at v. 793 of Juvenal’s proverbial auctoritas (10.356). At another level he cannot see beyond his pagan perspective. And the monarch who desires to oversee his subjects even from beyond the grave now monopolizes their reaction to his request. Two lines (vv. 809–10) sufﬁce to outline their hesitation, before Patricida intervenes: “It is, and was, not ﬁtting for the stern and hallowed senate to argue with captious cleverness. On one side an enthymeme sounds forth, on the other an induction; Varus repeats himself in oblique and veiled language. Under his breath he is attempting to arrive at a grand conclusion and to tie me down, imperceptibly, with logical reasoning. But the words of these quick-witted sophists are incapable of moving me from my resolve. Pollio’s oration, gilded with ﬁne eloquence, deploys the weapons of passionate feeling; he plays the role of persuasive rhetor, with ﬂourishes and metaphors, varying his style and position with artful expertise. But language has no attraction nor style a charm that can sway me from my determination and desire to die. Although Camillus was rustic in both voice and dress, he found favor with the gods by his lack of sophistication. Persiﬂage did not appeal to stern Cato, 828 his speech was plain and unadorned.”183

Accused of verbosity by the loquacious Patricida, Varus and Pollio are denied even the privilege of speech. Who then are these muted opponents, and what purpose do they serve? Among the classical sources known to Bernardus the most likely candidates are the literary land commissioners of 47 B.C., P. Alfenus Varus and C. Asinius Pollio, whose names, mentioned by both Vergil and Horace, are linked by Servius in his commentary on Eclogue 9.27. If the presentation of Varus as a dialectician or jurist and of Pollio as an orator does not correspond exactly to the activities for which either of them was known in an183 “‘Non decet aut decuit rigidum sanctumque senatum / Argumentosa calliditate loqui. / Enthymema sonat, sonat hinc inductio; Varus / Verba per anfractus fertque refertque vagos; / Nescio quid magnum tacite concludere temptat / Et logica sensim me ratione ligat; / Sed tamen argutis non est ea lingua sophistis, / Ut valeant cepto me removere meo! / Eloquitur vultumque sui sermonis inaurat / Pollio facundi pectoris arma movens; / Suadet, adornat, agit oratoremque ﬁgurat, / Alterat arte modos, alterat arte locos. / Non ea depictae venus est aut gratia voci, / Quae mea prevertat vota meumque mori. / Agrestis tam veste fuit quam voce Camillus, / Gratus apud superos rusticitate sua. / Non pictis nugis rigidi placuere Catones; / Sermo patens illis et sine veste fuit’” (vv. 811–28).

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tiquity, parallels may be drawn to the association of Pollio with a “grand style” at Horace, Sat. 1.10.42–44 and to Varus’s reputation as a legal authority.184 Historical accuracy, however, is not the purpose of Patricida’s critique of their rhetoric. Varus and Pollio are instances from his imagined present who serve as foils to Camillus and Cato, exemplary ﬁgures of the republican past. The proverbial simplicity of Camillus (here invested with some of the traits of Cincinnatus) and of Cato evokes the criterion of rusticitas, the praise of “primitivism,” common in Roman literature,185 which ﬁnds a focus in the sartorial metaphor of v. 828. To the metaphorical twins, munus and rex, a third ﬁgure is now added; and all three members of this trio appear together at the end of the poem. Patricida continues to argue by contrast and antithesis, in a form that belies its content, until his sophistical denunciation of sophistry reaches a peak at vv. 829ff.: “Greece showed rustic Latium how to speak in tones smooth, complex, and magniloquent. How sad was that day when the plain and unvarnished truth became unpopular and persiﬂage had more appeal! Would that the sea had made Athens inaccessible! Rome would not have become a bane through its glittering eloquence!”186

These themes, taken from Horace’s poetics,187 produce a complex ambiguity. Roman rusticitas, innocent of intricate (perplexum v. 830) argumentation and high-sounding (grande) oratory, had been corrupted by Greek rhetoric.188 Yet in illustrating that corruption by a summary, or caricature, of the speeches of the otherwise silent Varus and Pollio (vv. 813– 24), Patricida’s denunciation embodies all the faults it condemns. Sensing the weakness of this strategy of attack, he now resorts to the rhetor’s last lines of defense, the miseratio and the appeal to authority: “If regal entreaties have no effect on the Romans, if I, in my royal role, address deaf ears, then legal decrees are on my side, and the letter of the law gives weighty support to my request. 184 Varus is cited as a jurist in the Digest and by ps.-Acro on Horace, Satire 1.3.130, ed. O. Keller (Leipzig, 1904), p. 49. 185 See R. Vischer, Das einfache Leben. Wort- und motivgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu einem Wortbegriff der antiken Literatur (Göttingen, 1965), pp. 140ff. 186 “‘Agresti Latio monstravit Graecia blandum, / Graecia perplexum, Graecia grande loqui. / O gravis illa dies, qua simplex et rude verum / Sorduit et picti plus placuere soni! / Aequor inaccessas utinam fecisset Athenas! / Non foret eloquii Roma nitore nocens’” (vv. 829ff). 187 “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit agresti Latio.” Horace, Ep. 2.1.156–57 and cf. Ars Poetica 52– 53, 56 and Ep. 2.2.117. 188 Bernardus thus inverts the medieval topos of the translatio artium (discussed, with references, by Worstbrock, “Translatio artium”).

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Justinian pleads on my behalf, an orator from antiquity, whose dead tongue defends the interests of the living. My case rests on a powerful authority and his ancient word; he was the supreme judge in the entire world: 849 ‘Leader of the people and victor, have the gift that you desire.’ I am the leader and the victor: give me the desired gift.”189

That v. 849, or a legal provision resembling it, never appears in the Justinian compilations is unsurprising—the ruling cited by Patricida resembles the kind of legal “authority” that is ubiquitous in Roman declamation but nowhere to be found in Roman law.190 Is Justinian then merely invoked for his magnum nomen? What resonance did his name have in Tours, or in Northern France, in the 1140s? The evidence for knowledge of Roman law that survives from Tours dates chieﬂy from the period after 1150.191 In the region of Valence, however, there was produced, c. 1130, the Summa institutionum (Justitiani est in hoc opere) that enjoyed a swift diffusion and combines a description of Justinian as victor with the term praemium.192 Thierry of Chartres, Bernardus’s friend, possessed and bequeathed to the cathedral the Institutiones, Novellae, and Digestum of Justinian;193 and Philip, bishop of Bayeux, was collecting his works in the 1140s.194 But if Bernardus invoked Justinian’s name in the Mathematicus because he knew that the Digest, exceptionally in Roman law, made provision for suicide,195 Patricida draws from this auctoritas a profoundly ambiguous conclusion: 189 “‘Si nihil Ausonios exorans purpura tangit / Personaeque meae gratia surda perit, / At mecum faciunt legum decreta meisque / vocibus assensum littera praebet anus. / Ex olim meus est orator Iustinianus; / Viventis causam mortua lingua facit./ Non auctore levi neque verbo paupere nitor / — Arbiter in toto maximus orbe fuit: / “Dux populi, victor, munus, quod quaerit, habeto.” / Dux ego, victor ego, munera quaero: date’” (vv. 841– 50). 190 See D. Norr, Causa mortis. Auf den Spuren einer Redewendung (Munich, 1986), pp. 36ff. 191 Before the exile of Thomas Becket, at least one English student of humanum ius is attested at Tours. See S. Kuttner and T. Rathbone, “Anglo-Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century,” Traditio 7 (1949/50), p. 289. 192 P. Legendre, ed. (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 21, 62. On the diffusion see P. Durliac, “Une statue de Justinien en Rouerque vers 1140,” Revue historique de droit français 66 (1988), pp. 329–35, and especially A. Gouron, La Science juridique française aux xie et xiie siècles. Diffusion du droit de Justinien et inﬂuence canonique jusqu’à Gratien, Romanum Medii Aevi, L 4 d-e (Milan, 1978). 193 References to, and discussion of bequests of legal texts to Chartres are provided by R. Giacone, “Masters, Books and Library at Chartres according to the Cartularies of Notre Dame and Saint-Père,” Vivarium 10 (1972), p. 44 with nn. 93– 95. 194 See R. H. and M. A. Rouse in The Classics in the Middle Ages (Binghampton, N.Y., 1990), pp. 315–42. 195 The Digest of Justinian, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Kreuger, trans. A. Watson, 4 (Philadelphia, 1988), bk. 48, cap. 21.

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“Yet, because he exercises the honorable ofﬁce that 853 you have bestowed on him, your king ceases to be monarch of himself; swiftly I lay down my royal robe, and divest myself of the persona of your king. Liber et explicitus ad mea vota meus.”196

The terms dux and munus recall Patricida’s previous and unsuccessful attempt to sever them from their connection with the Neoplatonic and Christian metaphor prohibiting suicide. The language is formal and quasilegal; the possessive pronouns at v. 853 underline the contrast between the king’s public and private roles; and as the verbs change from the third to the ﬁrst person in v. 854, so does Patricida’s identity. Recurring to the sartorial metaphors that he had employed earlier in his speech, Patricida proclaims his freedom in the ﬁnal line (855). Its ambiguity has been detected on two levels: the conclusion of the book, or poem, and the ending of the king’s life.197 Yet there is a third level of ambiguity in this auctoritas, linked with the ancient etymology of Patricida’s name, which is inconsistent with the second. Parricidium, since antiquity, had possessed multiple meanings, denoting not only the murder of a father but also the slaying of a ruler;198 and the extinction of Patricida’s regal status here sets him on the same plane as other free men. Liber at last,199 Patricida has divested himself of his public munus and asserted his private persona. Does that also entail his killing himself, as has been assumed?200 Nothing in the text warrants such an assumption. Subverted by the ambiguous rhetoric in which they were couched, Patricida’s arguments for self-destruction have produced a different solution to his dilemma—a solution that had a precise resonance in the political and legal thought of Bernardus’s contemporaries. The analogy Patricida draws between his will and the divine power of fate; the appeal to the authority of Justinian; the care with which this king distinguishes between his privata voluntas and his obligations to the res publica: none of this would have seemed unfamiliar to the generation of 196 “‘Sed, quia muneribus vestri fungatur honoris, / Rex ideo vester desinit esse suus, / Pono citus trabeam, vestrum citus exuo regem, / Liber et explicitus ad mea vota meus’” (vv. 851– 55). 197 W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century. The Literary Inﬂuence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972), p. 157. 198 See Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 10, 1 (Leipzig, 1982), p. 442, 53ff. On the etymology and meaning of the term, see Nörr, Causa mortis, p. 8n.22. 199 For comparable etymological associations of liber with “book” and “freedom,” see Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores, ed. R.B.C. Huygens (Brussels, 1955), p. 16,104– 105: “Dictus autem liber est a liberando, quia qui vacat lectioni sepe mentem solvit a curis et vinculis mundi.” Cf. O. Weyers, “L’Appelation des disciplines dans les classiﬁcations des sciences aux xiie et xiiie siècles,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 46 – 47,2 (1988), 39 – 63. 200 Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry, p. 157 and n. 8, followed by Dronke, Fabula, p. 136.

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John of Salisbury or to younger readers of the Policraticus. For the purpose of the succession of scenes, beginning with the appeal of Patricida’s mother to her son to lay down his regal functions and attend to his ﬁlial duties, which culminate in this ﬁnal act of abnegation or abdication, is to ﬁx in the minds of the readers a distinction between the two parts, public and private, of its hero’s gemina persona. This distinction was already established in a body of legal, political, and theological writings on the king’s “two bodies” which acquired new momentum in the early twelfth century.201 Upon it the conclusion of the Mathematicus depends. Reinforced, perhaps, by the ancient doctrine—transmitted by, among others, Firmicus Maternus202 —that the ruler was above the astrologer’s predictions and immune to stellar inﬂuence, Patricida’s separation of the two parts of his gemina persona amounts to an act of liberation from ofﬁce. Liber through parricidium rather than despite it, Patricida, the exemplary ruler, has answered the question raised earlier in the poem about the civic doctrine of Cicero’s De inventione with ambiguous eloquence.203 What follows from this act is deliberately left open.204 But among the alternative possibilities, suicide is the least subtle and least compelling. Le roi est mort! Vive L’ambiguïté! “With great accuracy it has been said by the dialecticians that every word is ambiguous.” Augustine’s discussion of this Stoic doctrine played a signiﬁcant role in the thought of Bernardus’s contemporaries. Adam of Balsham205 and Abelard206 are but two examples of a number of early-twelfthcentury philosophers who concerned themselves with the problems posed by ambiguity or equivocation in the theory of fallacy.207 Fallacy, equivo201 See E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), pp. 42ff., especially pp. 95 – 97 and cf. J. Chiffoleau, “Dire l’indicible. Remarques sur la catégorie du nefandum du 12e au 15e siècle,” Annales 45 (1990), pp. 289ff. 202 Mathesis 2, 30, 5, p. 86, 12–21. 203 On the social importance of rhetoric to kings see John of Salisbury, Policraticus 4, 6 (ed. Webb, 1, pp. 254ff.) with B. Smalley, The Becket Conﬂict and the Schools. A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Oxford, 1973), pp. 96– 97 and R. Ray, “Rhetorical Scepticism and Verisimilar Narrative in John of Salisbury’s Historia Pontiﬁcalis,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. E. Breisbach (New York, 1989), pp. 61f., esp. p. 68. 204 Cf. W. von den Steinen, “Les Sujets d’inspiration chez les poètes latins du 12e siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 9 (1966), p. 378: “J’ai l’impression que Bernard n’était pas en premier lieu intéressé à trouver un dénouement à tout prix” [⫽id., Menschen im Mittelalter. Gesammelte Forschungen, Betrachtungen, Bilder, ed. P. von Moos (Berne, 1967), p. 238]. 205 See Minio-Paluello, “The Ars Disserendi. of Adam of Balsham ‘Parvipontanus,’” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1954), pp. 116 – 69. 206 See De Rijk, Logica Modernorum (Assen, 1962– 67), p. 49ff. 207 See ibid., p. 65ff., 94ff., and above, p. 236, n. 66. For a survey see A. de Libera, “La Logique du moyen âge.”

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cation, and ambiguity are the faults Patricida attributes to Varus, whose reported sophistry is linked to that of the orator Pollio in a sequence of associations that recalls the argument of De dialectica 7.208 For Augustine, as for Bernardus, the challenge of ambiguity lay in its elusiveness, and the Mathematicus is both an illustration and a refutation of the paradox Augustine critically reports from Cicero’s lost Hortensius: “How, then, can ambiguity be explained by ambiguous means?”209 But the Mathematicus is much more than this. It portrays a virtuous pagan who is both an expert in the verbal arts and the victim of their deceptiveness. When, in his struggle with language, Patricida misuses the device of occupatio or suspense and delivers, in the prolix style of his parents, a speech that obscures more than it expresses, rhetorical techniques display the misuse of rhetoric. Such misuse, magniﬁed by the exaggerations of a hyperbolic style, provokes a combination of sympathy and scepticism on the part of the poem’s readers, who are invited to ponder the aptness of a medium that the protagonists of the Mathematicus keenly exploit but imperfectly control. Their mastery of language becomes a central question when Patricida seeks to reduce the component parts of a Neoplatonic and Christian metaphor to literal terms in order to assert the opposite of its established connotations. His inadvertent ambiguity, here, is not purely verbal. It reﬂects the limitations of Patricida’s understanding and illustrates the historical situation of a pagan which Augustine discusses in his other, more extended and inﬂuential, treatment of ambiguity in De doctrina christiana: He who employs or reveres a signiﬁer, without knowing what it signiﬁes, is a slave to the sign: but he who employs or respects a useful sign established by God, understanding its force of signiﬁcation, does not worship transitory appearances but rather the point of all such referents. Such a man is divinely inspired and free.210

Asserting that he is liber at the end of the Mathematicus, Patricida remains trapped by the equivocality of the signa on which he has premised his freedom. That freedom, in his eyes, was acquired when he divided his gemina persona—a division that disposed of only one sense of the rex-munus 208 209

Pinborg and Jackson, eds., p. 102, 15ff. “Quomodo igitur ambigua ambiguis explicabunt?” De dialectica 9, ibid., pp. 106–

108. 210 “Sub signo enim servit, qui operatur aut veneratur aliquam rem signiﬁcantem nesciens quid signiﬁcet: qui vero aut operatur aut veneratur utile signum divinitus institutum, cuius vim signiﬁcationemque intellegit, non hoc veneratur, quod videtur et transit, sed illiud potius, quo talia cuncta referenda sunt. Talis autem homo spiritalis et liber est.” 3, 9, 13; ed. J. Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout, 1962), p. 85. Cf. 2, 23, 32 (ibid., p. 55) on libertas, mathematici, and ambiguity.

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metaphor that he employed without grasping its double meaning. Between the partial perceptions of its heathen hero and the wider perspective of its Christian readers, the Mathematicus thus generates a multiple indeterminacy: an indeterminacy enriched by its protagonist’s misappropriation of ethical eloquence. All the characters in Bernardus’s poem are moral exemplars. Even their faults are products of their virtues. Presented at a stage of historical development which is plainly pre-Christian, none of them ﬁnds an idiom adequate to grapple with the dilemma that confronts him. Moral rhetoric, in the mouths of these distraught determinists, Patricida’s parents, is twisted into convolutions of paradox. Patricida himself, appealing to ratio in terms that Bernardus had found in pseudo-Quintilian, evokes the well-attested ﬁgure of the pagan defying arbitrary fatalism.211 Unconsciously employing the language of sin and redemption, Patricida, the censor of sophistry, nonetheless ends by succumbing to the very vices that he condemns. Parricide and suicide, determinism and free will are, by the conclusion of the Mathematicus, the least of his problems. Patricida’s existential quandry lies with language—with the conﬂict between an ambiguous signiﬁer and an elusive signiﬁed. Germane to that conﬂict is the issue of etymology that the poem raises by dwelling on its hero’s name and identity. Questions about etymology’s function are posed in a context of deﬁnition by antiphrasis, of afﬁrmation by denial. Irony is aroused by this technique,212 but irony is also employed as a means to an end. That end was to suggest a position about the status of language which is closer to the Stoic view of its anomalousness than to that of Augustine himself. For by evoking the principle ex re nomen habet only to reject its application, by making of Patricida not the murderer of his father but the slayer of the king, Bernardus illustrates the deceptiveness of the link drawn between verba and res in earlier medieval etymological theory. He was not alone in this scepticism. Abelard is a comparable witness to the change of opinion on this issue among philosophers of language during the early twelfth century.213 Such a rejection of etymology—not only as a literary convention but also as a form of thought214 —accompanied by subversion of the devices of rhetorical discourse in the Mathematicus, reﬂected a dual purpose that was 211 Declamatio maior, 4,14,4ff. (ed. Håkanson, p. 76). Cf. the use of the same schema by Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanarum religionum 17,4, ed. R. Turcan (Paris, 1982), p. 115. For the late-antique context, see F. A. Cramer, Astrology in Roman Law and Politics (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 279ff. 212 See D. Knox, Ironia. Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden, 1989), pp. 158ff. 213 See J. Jolivet, Arts du langage et théologie chez Abelard (Paris, 1982), pp. 73 –74. 214 Curtius, ELLMA, pp. 486ff.

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understood in the medieval reception of the poem. For here was a text that, in the manner of Umberto Eco’s “open work,” provoked its readership to refashion its form and to rethink its implications through an indeterminacy that gives the lie to Eco’s own preconceptions about medieval literature.215 Open through its ambiguity, ambiguous through its insistence on the discrepancy between signiﬁer and signiﬁed, the Mathematicus differs from more recent opere aperte not by determinacy but by its refusal to admit one of the deﬁning features of modern ambiguity: self-referentiality.216 This refusal is intimately connected with the poem’s form. As a metrical version of a prose model, the Mathematicus has its origins in a school tradition of translatio; and paraphrase—from Augustine to Vaugelas and Empson217 —was the method consistently recommended to counter the “vice,” or analyze the contradictions, of ambiguity. Those contradictions, that vice, are made integral to the practice of paraphrase as it is transformed in the Mathematicus. For the answer to the question, “How far does the treatment of the pseudo-Quintillian’s work in the Mathematicus correspond to Bernardus’s theory of imitation and emulation?” is, hardly at all. Such theories were inadequate to characterize the relationship between his poem and its model, because what Bernardus attempted, and achieved, was something more radical. The merely verbal ambiguity of Declamatio maior 4 serves as his starting point for an exploration of the indeterminacy of meaning; and by demonstrating the precariousness of positions whose relation to reality depended on their equivocal form of expression, Bernardus launched a well-directed attack on his manneristic precursors in the Medieval Latin poetic tradition. For Hildebert or for Marbod, had they read the Mathematicus, there was much that was familiar—much indeed that was indebted to their writings. The denunciation of women’s evils, the depiction of fortune’s ﬁckleness, the concern with predictive astrology: all these were themes that Bernardus’s work shared with their own. Like them, he drew on a literary culture 215 Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1967), p. 111. Cf. id., Arte e bellezza nell’ estetica medievale (Milan, 1987), pp. 44ff. On ambiguity in Eco’s work, see J. Trabant’s introduction to the German translation of La struttura assente (Munich, 1972), p. 10. Cf. above, p. xiv. 216 See C. Bode, Ästhetik der Ambiguität. Zur Funktion und Bedeutung von Mehrdeutigkeit in der Literatur der Moderne (Tübingen, 1988), especially pp. 384ff. Cf. T. Bathi, “Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The Juncture,” Comparative Literature 38 (1986), pp. 209–23. 217 Augustine, De dialectica 9; C. Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française (1847), ed. J. Streicher (Paris, 1934), pp. 246ff. with Q. Mok, “Vaugelas et la desambiguïsation de la parole,” Lingua 21 (1968), pp. 303 –11; W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1939), with J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 183ff. and P. de Man, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Fiction, 2nd ed. (London, 1983), pp. 236ff.

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that assigned a privileged place to the writings of Ovid and Boethius. Yet in the poetry of Hildebert or Marbod, the incongruities of these models are subordinated to an ideal of smooth restraint. It is not the excesses of Ovidian rhetoric which are brought into play in their well-mannered exercises but Ovidian reﬁnement. Inconsistency was no obstacle to their polite art. On women, on astrology, on fortune and fate, they unhesitatingly presented incompatible positions, conﬁdent that the blandness of their style would accommodate the most glaring of contradictions. Meaning, for Hildebert and Marbod, is dependent on rhetoric; and rhetoric, in their works, is but a tool to be manipulated. Hence the polemical point of Bernardus’s demonstration, in the Mathematicus, of rhetoric’s equivocality; hence his subversion and refashioning of Hildebert’s and Marbod’s favored themes. Seizing on these vulnerable points in the work of his predecessors, Bernardus employed their double-edged techniques in order to demonstrate the openness of issues they regarded as closed. Ambiguity re-established as a cognitive attribute of poetic language, poetry thereby justiﬁed its claim to a place in the hierarchy of knowledge. The (a)equivocationes and multivocationes treated with such suspicion in his exegesis of Vergil and Martianus Capella now became, in the Mathematicus, the essence of Bernardus’s case for attributing philosophical value to his medium. It is difﬁcult to imagine how, given his own categories, he could have constructed a more elegant answer to the objections that had been made to poetry by (among others) himself. From the Mathematicus, freely modeled on pseudo-Quintilian, to the commentaries on the Aeneid and De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, the development that culminates in the Cosmographia can be understood as a series of attempts, on the part of this creative exegete, to deﬁne his independence in terms of other authoritative writings. When he turned, at the beginning of the Cosmographia, to scripture, the supreme auctoritas—in particular to the book of Genesis, together with the Latin translation of the Timaeus read in the light of Calcidius’s commentary—Bernardus was confronted with a delicate problem. Small wonder that he submitted his work to Thierry’s judgment or sought, from the pope, the reassurance of censura praevia. For if the Cosmographia was not classiﬁable as theology or philosophy, into which category of thought did it ﬁt?218 The Mathematicus had showed that even metrical paraphrases of the classroom could treat problems that the enemies of literature reserved for 218 For the bafﬂement of modern interpreters, cf. J. Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150). An Introduction (London, 1983), p. 127: “Bernard[us]’ aims are not those of a philosopher—even a bad philosopher. He does not analyse or argue. . . .”

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dialectic and rhetoric. Turning against the modish exponents of these subjects the old-fashioned medium that they despised, Bernardus had integrated poetry into that ideal which Thierry of Chartres called cohaerentia artium. But if the artes formed a unity, how, in the Cosmographia, to establish the distinctness, while preserving the dignity, of literature, without trespassing into the territory of the theologians or employing the suspect methods of the “pseudo-dialecticians”? These questions were not answerable by appeal to formalism. It did (and does) not help to call Bernardus’s book a prosimetrum.219 There were many precedents in Medieval Latin literature for the mixture of prose and verse which Bernardus employed,220 but none of them, since Boethius’s Philosophiae Consolatio, had exploited the possibilities of both to probe such controversial issues as the creation and ornatus mundi. There was, however, an analogue—neglected but signiﬁcant, because earlier. The De sacramentis christianae ﬁdei was Hugh of Saint-Victor’s theological summa.221 Divine revelation is presented, in that popular work, as successive manifestations of the opus creationis and the opus restaurationis. If a likeness to Hugh’s diptych is offered by the two parts—Megacosmus and Microcosmus—of the Cosmographia, the similarity of structure highlights a marked difference of content. For Hugh’s devaluation of poetry, for his indifference to form and insistence on truth, Bernardus substituted an effort to integrate medium with message. Theology being considered perilous or prohibited ground, he would ﬁnd an alternative to the methods of speaking about the mystery and the order of creation employed by Hugh and William of Saint-Thierry. The ﬁrst step was renunciation. Following an example set by others, notably Macrobius and William of Conches, Bernardus decided not to write directly about the summum bonum. Indirectly, through analogies, he approached the subject of divine principles by the other route described, in his commentaries, as integumentum. Integumentum, as Bernardus Silvestris understood and applied it, was different from the quality detected in holy writ by Abelard. At the highest level of scripture, where allegory alone held sway, integumenta had no purchase. Fabula, the ﬁctitious quality of the philosophical text, was not to be admitted in writing about the highest divinity. Only when dealing with 219 For bibliography cf. B. Papst, Prosimetrum. Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spätantike und Spätmittelalter, Ordo 4/1. Studien zur Literatur und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 1994), pp. 446 –75. 220 For the tradition see Dronke, ed., Cosmographia, pp. 16ff. and id., Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante. The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (London, 1994). 221 PL 176, 173 – 618. See M. Colish, Peter Lombard 1 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 57ff. and cf. C. Mews, “Philosophy and Theology 1100 –1150: The Search for Harmony,” in Le xiie siècle. Mutations en France dans la première moitié du xiie siècle, ed. F. Gasparri (Paris, 1994), pp. 159–203, esp. 187ff.

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“the soul or etherial and celestial powers” were integumenta allowed. Yet if their rank was lower and their truth-claims relative, they too participated in a misterium . . . occultum. So Bernardus in his accessus to Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii.222 The position advanced there was both defensive and aggressive. Defensive in that, distinguishing between the elevated reaches of historia and the inferior plane of fabula, he modestly marked his distance from the superior science of theology; and aggressive in the claim that not only the Bible but also the Aeneid contained a sense of mystery, suprahuman and metaphysical.223 “The diverse referents of integumenta, their multiple connotations” were to be attended to in omnibus mysticis, Bernardus had written in his commentary on the ﬁrst book of Virgil’s epic, adding the qualiﬁcation: si in una veritas stare non poterit.224 Where was that space in which meaning was plural and indeterminacy a principle of creation? In the emergence of order from chaos by a process that neither the hair-splitting of the “pseudo-dialecticians” nor the labored treatments of the theologians was capable of conveying. Such was Bernardus’s proposed solution to the issue of intellectual freedom posed by the controversies of the 1140s; such was the theme he set out to explore in the Cosmographia. The account of creation in the book of Genesis raised problems for Bernardus’s contemporaries, from Hugh of Saint-Victor to Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches.225 Considering, at the beginning of his De sacramentis, the topic of divine revelation before the incarnation, Hugh relied chieﬂy on holy writ.226 When scripture appeared reticent, ambiguous, or unclear, this exponent of literal and historical interpretation hesitated, before limping on to the allegorical sense. The word of God, as he read it 222 “Nam et ibi historia et hic fabula misterium habent occultum, quod alias discutiendum erit. Allegoria quidem divine pagine, integumentum vero philosophice competit. Non tamen ubique, teste Macrobio, involucrum tractatus admittit philosophicus. Cum enim ad summum, inquit, Deum stilus se audit attollere, nefas est fabulosa vel licita admittere. Ceterum cum de anima vel de ethereis aereiisve potestatibus agitur, locum habent integumenta.” Westra, ed., p. 45, 76–82. Translated and commented by Stock, Myth and Science, pp. 39ff. 223 Martianus-commentary, ed. Westra, p. 45, 82ff. 224 See above, p. 236. 225 Fundamental, as background, are Y. Congar, “Le Thème de Dieu-créateur et les explications de l’ Hexaméron dans la tradition chrétienne,” in L’Homme devant Dieu. Mélanges . . . H. de Lubac 1 (Lyons, 1963), pp. 189 –222 and Colish, Peter Lombard 1, pp. 303ff. Cf. J. Zahlten, Creatio mundi. Darstellungen der sechs Schöpfungstage und naturwissenschaftliches Weltbild im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1979); H. Merle, “Sic dissolutum est Chaos. Monographie sur le mythe de la notion de Chaos, héritage de l’ Antiquité au Moyen Age,” in L’ Art des conﬁns. Mélanges . . . M. de Gandillac, ed. A. Cazenave (Paris, 1985), pp. 365 – 86 and J. Whitman, Allegory. The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford, 1987), pp. 161– 217. 226 See M.-D. Chenu, “Nature ou histoire? Une controverse exégétique sur la création au xiie siècle,” AHDLM 28 (1953), pp. 25 – 30.

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with prosaic honesty, did not appear shrouded in an aura of mystery, nor did Hugh deny that the simplicity of his style might grate on the sensibilities of those accustomed to the arts of composition.227 About this he could not care less, shrugged the indifferent literalist, provided that veritas was established. This criterion was not indifferent to Bernardus Silvestris. Had he not stated, in his commentary on the Aeneid, that the rhetorical colores that Hugh spurned had no place in the higher sphere of mathematics and theology?228 Yet it did not follow that, on the lower level occupied by poetry, the medium he had employed so searchingly in the Mathematicus was reducible to an appendage, an ornament, or a veneer. There was also a place for evocation, a space for speculation between the literal and historical levels of holy writ to which Hugh attached priority and beyond which he moved with palpable ill-ease. That ill-ease is apparent in a term used reluctantly in De sacramentis: the verb coniicere. Commenting on the formlessness of creation at the beginning of the world, Hugh remarks, “As far as I have been able to conjecture, on the basis of those things which I have found expressed either plainly or obscurely on this issue by scripture, according to historical truth, the ﬁrst unformed mass of all created things appeared then in the same place in which it now exists in fashioned form.”229 A description follows, in which Hugh attempts to imagine what the Bible does not specify: the darkness, the dampness, the shrouds of mist hanging like specters upon the surface of the earth. These tenebrae, “I think,” were created together with the celestial and terrestrial chaos that they shrouded. But how could holy writ license his interpretation, when a single and reliable text had not been established? One reading assigned the adjective empty (inanis) to the earth; another, the epithet unfashioned (incomposita). Between these two variants Hugh struggled vainly, searching for a deﬁnition capable of harmonizing them. What, for example, did it mean when the book of Genesis mentioned the heaven before the earth? Was a temporal priority indicated or, as the perplexed exegete was inclined to believe, a difference of dignitas? 230 Up or down? Over or under? Are the prepositions and the positions to be interpreted historically, literally, or ﬁguratively? And where were the waters at this bafﬂing moment? Beneath the heaven or on top of it? Let us get it straight that, when scripture describes “the ﬁrmament being created on the second day and called the heavens,” the meaning is: 227 “Si forte sermo simplicior colorem dictaminis servare non potuerit, non multum interesse putari, eadem veritate constante.” PL 176, 173–74. 228 See above, p. 235. 229 PL 176, 190. 230 Ibid., 191.

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The heaven was created—sky and heaven—heaven above the sky and beneath the sky heaven. Indeed, until today, there is heaven above the sky and beneath the heaven sky and the entire heaven is one from one sky.231

As Hugh’s literalism ties itself up in knots of redundancy, he continues to worry at the distinction between the formlessness and the confusion of creation. How long did it remain in this state? Scripture gives no clear indication (manifeste non ostendit).232 He, however, ventures an opinion: “insofar as I can conjecture,” a chronological sequence divided the creation from the ordering of the world, but the delay was minimal or nonexistent. The one event followed the other, successive yet immediate; the visible world of matter and the invisible essence of angels existed, simultaneously, both with and without matter. Attempting to distinguish between chronology and simultaneity, between form and matter, Hugh of Saint-Victor lapses into the confusion that he is seeking to disentangle. Literal and historical exegesis, as practiced by him, was not always equal to the problems that he wished to address. What Hugh calls conjecture is another name for speculation; and no number of distinctions or counterdistinctions can disguise the fact that his wish to remain true to the letter of scripture impedes his ability to seize its meaning. Where that meaning is elusive or equivocal, his method, dogged in its assiduity, sticks to the text of holy writ, before becoming unstuck at the prospect of pluralism. Incapable, on the lack of explicit evidence, of reaching the univocality that is his goal, Hugh of Saint-Victor is able, by the logic and limitations of his procedure, only to note a range of interpretive possibilities, before continuing to wander in the same hermeneutic circle. That circle was not perceived as closed by Hugh’s contemporaries. They viewed it as open to debate—one that reached the ears of the Roman authorities, stated Clarenbald of Arras in the letter he prefaced to Thierry of Chartres’ account of creation.233 “Rome has entrusted to her archives” 231 “Ergo terra deorsum erat et coelum sursum, et quod supra terram erat coelum erat. Ergo coelum supra terram erat. Et aquae ubi erant? Sub coelo an supra coelum? Neque sub coelo, neque supra coelum aquae erant; sed in coelo aquae erant, quia ipsum coelum aquae erant. Totum aquae et totum coelum; quia idem aquae et coelum. Secunda die factum est ﬁrmamentum et vocatum est coelum; et positum est ut divideret inter aquas et aquas, et quae prius aquae erant factae sunt aquae, aquae quae sub coelo et aquae quae super coelum. Et factum est coelum, coelum et coelum; coelum supra coelum et sub coelo coelum. Usque hodie etiam coelum est supra coelum et sub coelo coelum, et totum ex uno coelo et unum coelum.” Ibid., 191. 232 Ibid., 192. 233 Ed. N. Häring, “The Creation and Creator of the World according to Thierry of Chartres and Clarenbaldus of Arras,” AHDLM 30 (1955), pp. 137–216, esp. 183 and id., Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School (Toronto, 1971), pp. 553– 75; translated by Maccagnolo, Il divino e il megacosmo, pp. 179–206. Following references are to Häring’s 1971 edition.

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this work by Europe’s leading philosopher, Clarenbald claimed, but Thierry’s views were not allowed to slumber in the dust. His opinions on cosmology and creation234 were attacked by William of Conches. The imposition of order, Thierry had argued, following an older school of thought, presupposed disorder that the creator had removed so that his wisdom could be displayed.235 “Displayed to whom?” objected William caustically. “To an angel? But angels need no enlightenment. By nature and grace, they have foreknowledge of the divine will. Was it then to humans? But they did not yet exist. . . . This line of reasoning is not suitable.”236 What line of reasoning, what method of exposition was suitable, then, to convey the inordinatio of creation? Plato had been misunderstood, William asserted. When we speak of God restoring the elements to order, it is like saying about a friend: “He saved us from that disaster”—not because the calamity came ﬁrst and the rescue followed, but because a mishap would have occurred, had he not been there to warn us.237 If divine providence is conceived ﬁguratively, a chronological distinction between the act of creation and the imposition of ornatus might be rejected, and William was then free to conceive of genesis in “physical” terms. The world was where it now is, but not in its present form. Chaos—the confusion of the elements—is what “Moses” meant when he said: “The earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). Rejecting this interpretation adopted by Thierry, William of Conches substituted his own. But the path to physicalis philosophia had ﬁrst to be cleared before he could embark on an account of natural processes in the created world,238 and the rhetorical techniques of the trope play a more prominent role in his “physics” than is sometimes allowed.239 God, the soul, and the elements are the three principles on which William bases his explanation; and if its advantage lay in its coherence, its drawback consisted in the urge to remove ambiguity that he shared with Hugh. It was not difﬁcult, with William of Conches’s methods, to distinguish between the divine and the physical or to establish their causal connections with one another. But it was exceedingly hard, on his premises, to apprehend how that relationship altered and to visualize, in the process of change, an interpenetration of the celestial and the terrestrial. And if their collaboration, 234 Discussed by Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 139ff; Dronke, “Thierry of Chartres,” in Cambridge History, pp. 358 – 85, esp. 374ff. and E. Jeauneau, “Simples notes sur la cosmogonie de Thierry de Chartres,” Sophia 23 (1955), pp. 172– 83. 235 Tractatus 2, ed. Häring, Commentaries, p. 556, 27ff. 236 Philosophia 1, 37, ed. Maurach, pp. 34 – 35. 237 Ibid., 1, 38 – 39, p. 35. 238 See Speer, Entdeckte Natur, p. 143, 147, 150. 239 Cf. J. Cadden, “Science and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Natural Philosophy of William of Conches,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), pp. 1–24.

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Chartres,240

assumed by Thierry of was not excluded by William of Conches’s admission that matter implied an aspect of being irreducible to physical principles241, the rigor of his theory of natural processes minimized the sphere of mutability. It was in such a sphere, indeterminate in character and polyvalent in perception, that Bernardus’s etherie aerieve potestates operated. Hence the choice, calculated and subtle, of a different level of cosmological speculation when the Cosmographia opens not with God but with Sylva or Hyle holding the primordial substrate in her grasp.242 Complaining to Noys, her “true Minerva,” about the chaos of the universe, Natura voices that yearning for order that represents one of the central themes of Bernardus’s book. Drawing attention to the unﬁnished, undisciplined state of creation, she depicts it in images of control. Silva, as Natura sees her, can hardly be called by her true name as a work of God. Rather, she is the “unstable fabric of sightless fortune, bereft of better lords.” Noys, despite her beauty, holds sway in “a shapeless and unadorned court” and, if Silva’s realm is ancient, her rule is harsh.243 The metaphors of monarchy employed by this poet at the royal abbey of Saint-Martin conjure up usurped dominions, unworthy lordship, and arbitrary power. In the wake of prolonged dynastic conﬂicts that opposed the counts of Anjou and Blois,244 Bernardus Silvestris cast in feudal terms his concept of disorder. Separation of powers, resistance to the encroachments of tyrannny, yearning for harmony: all these are entailed by a divinum opus in the rigor of the term (nomine vero). Restoration of that lost balance, that elusive concord, is depicted as a return to etymological principles. Language, traduced by the chaos of reality, should be measured by the standards of truth. But truth, amid such instability, can scarcely be perceived (vix . . . censetur). Perception, both of the ideal and of the real, therefore cannot be entrusted to any single principle. Natura herself, capable of description, does not venture to deﬁne. Deferring to Noys, she doubts her ability to grasp a 240

Cf. Dronke, “Thierry of Chartres,” pp. 375, 379. Cf. T. Briadjiev, “Die Naturwissenschaft als Metaphysik der Natur bei Wilhelm von Conches,” in ‘Scientia’ und ‘ars,’ pp. 369 – 80, esp. 373. 242 Dronke, ed., pp. 97ff. For an interpretative synopsis of the Cosmographia, see ibid., pp. 31ff.; cf. Stock, Myth and Science, pp. 63ff. 243 “Omnibus hiis quia Silva caret, vix nomine vero / Divinum censetur opus, sed lubrica cece / Machina Fortune, melioribus orba patronis. / Pace tua, Nois alma, loquar: Pulcherrima cum sis, / Informi nudaque tibi regnatur in aula. / Regnum, Silva, tuum vetus et gravis ipsa videris.” Megacosmus 1, p. 98, vv. 52– 57. 244 See L. Halphen, Le Comté d’ Anjou au xie siècle (Paris, 1906), pp. 13 – 53 and J. Chartrou, L’Anjou de 1109 à 1151. Foulque de Jérusalem et Geoffroi Plantagenet (Paris, 1928), pp. 32ff. 241

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subject that “perhaps passes my understanding” (Megacosmos, 1, v.7). After lodging her request and imparting her lesson, she is ashamed at having presumed “to teach Minerva” (ibid.,1, v. 66). “Resigna! (Mark off!). Distingue!” she admonishes in the spirit of the scholastic distinctiones. Yet Noys, who styles herself “knowledge and arbiter of the divine will to shape the universe,” denies that Natura’s plan could be “coaxed forth” (evocari) in the present until the date established by divine laws.245 Ad efﬁcentiam evocari . . . presentem does not mean “brought to present realization.”246 Rather than force and compulsion, the verb connotes eliciting or drawing out; and its delicate shade of meaning reﬂects Bernardus’s hermeneutic design. Creation, the forces that shape it and the manner in which it is perceived, can be evoked but never determined in his Cosmographia. Hyle exists in “an ambiguous state” (ancipiti quadam . . . conditione), poised between good and evil.247 Without bounds or limits, uncircumscribed and inexhaustible, tantos sinus tantamque a principio continentiam explicavit, quantam rerum universitas exposcebat.248 The inﬁnitude of Hyle ranges from metaphor to paradox. Her “vast breasts”249 contrast with her “continence” or capacity. Harassed in manifold ways by nature in its various forms, she “cannot but be confused.” Permanently pregnant, inﬁnitely fertile, she is endlessly penetrated but always remains impervious to evil. Assuming the imprint of those who, like boisterous clients, enter and exit at will, the Hyle in whom Calcidius had detected malice is transformed by Bernardus Silvestris into a promiscuous plaything of cosmic forces. Passive, not active, she is the receptacle of malignitas, never its cause. Her confusion, like her vacillation, is not chosen but imposed. The tempo of Hyle’s brutish couplings leaves her drained and exhausted. Ethical considerations are alien to her vacuous character, for the perplexed prostitute of unformed matter borrows her being from the contradictions of others.250 Others, since antiquity, had reﬂected on the crudeness of 245 “Quod igitur de mundi molitione sanctis ac beatis affectibus et consilio conceperas altiore, ad efﬁcientiam non potuit evocari presentem, adusque terminum supernis legibus institutum.” Megacosmus 2, 1, p. 99, vv. 14 –17. 246 Wetherbee, trans., The Cosmographia, p. 69. 247 Megacosmus 2,2, p. 99. 248 Megacosmus 2, 4, p. 100. 249 “recesses” (Wetherbee, trans., The Cosmographia.) 250 “non turbari non potuit id quod ab omni natura tam multiformiter pulsaretur. Stabilitatem bonumque tranquillitatis excussit frequens nec intercisa frequentatio naturarum. Egredientium numerus ingredientibus locum patit. . . . Inconsistens et convertibile . . . cum proprie descriptionis iudicium non expectet, elabitur incognitum vultus vicarios alternando et id quod ﬁgurarum omnium susceptione convertitur, nullius sue forme signaculo specialiter insignitur. . . . Silva multo tutius porrigi dilatarique se patitur. . . . Quemadmodum quidem ad conceptus rerum publicos parturitionesque pregnabilis est et fecunda, non secus et ad malum indifferens est natura. . . . In illa quidem congerie repugnantia sibi semina glacialibus ﬂammida, velocibus pigra, contrariis motibus occurrendo, subiecti sui materiam vel substantiam differebant.” Megacosmus, 2, 4, 5, 6, p. 100.

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Hyle.251

No one before Bernardus Silvestris had regarded it with this measure of imaginative compassion. Declining value judgments, he sought empathy and captured, more cogently than a thousand distinctiones, the vulnerability of personiﬁed Hyle by likening her moral indifference and mercurial nature to the plight of a helpless whore. A cosmic principle thus viewed in terms of a terrestrial analogy, the material mingles with the divine. Silva-Hyle, an aspect of nature (“Erat Hyle Nature vultus antiquissimus,” Megacosmus 1, 4), is undeﬁnable in her own terms. To fathom and reform her, Providentia-Noys “gazed about, summed up her understanding, ingenium evocavit.”252 The repeated verb of evocation characterizes the complicity that Bernardus Silvestris seeks from his readers. Hyle, “who had laid covered in age-old darkness, assumed a different aspect,” under the inﬂuence of Noys. As she “gave birth to the elements,” a “different and mighty ﬁre emerged, which suddenly dispelled her innate darkness with its sparkling ﬂames.”253 At that moment of cosmic energeia, “the earth followed, not remarkable for that lightness or that radiance, but stabler and more substantial in its weightness.”254 To which antecedent does “that” (ea) refer? To the lightness of the sparkling ﬂames, to the radiance that had dispelled the obscurity of unformed matter? Such is the inference Bernardus leaves us to draw from a statement whose meaning depends on a negation of properties suggested, but not spelled out, by the one that precedes it. Understood in the light of each other, the sense of both is modiﬁed. The same properties attributed to ﬁre and earth are of a different kind and quality. Distinctions can be drawn without distinctiones, and likeness may imply difference. The presence of Noys, “fountain of light, seedbed of life, good of goodness and fullness of the divine knowledge that is called the mind of the most high,” is compared to “gazing at a polished mirror.”255 Not directly, from the essence of reality, but on the smooth surface of its reﬂection appears “sure knowledge of things to come.” So, linked to eternity and inseparable from God, “emanates” Endelechia, a sphere whose vast dimensions were able to be seen and understood not by the eyes but by the intellect. Like a fountain, she “thoroughly confounded by her ambiguous quality” those who gazed upon her—“often seeming more akin to the air, often more related to the heaven.” Where Hugh of Saint-Victor had tormented 251 See Dronke’s testimonia, p. 79 and J. O’Donnell, “The Meaning of Silva in the Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato by Calcidius,” MS 7 (1945), pp. 1–20, esp. 8 and M. Asper, “Silva Parens. Zur allegorischen Technik des Bernardus Silvestris,” in Fabrica. Studien zur antiken Literatur und ihrer Rezeption, ed. T. Baier (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 129 – 47. 252 Dronke, ed., Cosmographia, 2, 7, p. 100. 253 Ibid., 2, 9, p. 101. 254 “Secuta est terra, non ea levitate, non ea luce spectabilis, sed reﬁxior et corpulentie grossioris.” Ibid., 2, 9, p. 101. 255 Ibid., 2, 13, p. 102.

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the biblical text, sifting and separating its homonyms or variants in order to arrive at a single deﬁnition, Bernardus Silvestris both names his principle of creation and preserves the indeterminacy of her nature. “Who indeed,” he asks pointedly, “has deﬁned without fear of contradiction the essentia that emerges from harmony and from number?”256 Who indeed? Those who, like William of Conches, asked why Plato, in the Timaeus, posited numbers in the composition of the world-soul and answered: He applied numbers in order to imply the perfection of the soul . . . and for another reason as well. Among numbers are to be found proportions that convey harmony in its fullness.257

The philosophical terminology (numeri, consonantia) is identical, the reference to Plato shared; but the thought, profoundly different in the Cosmographia, indicates Bernardus’s alternative approach. William of Conches, despite the assurance with which he prescribed how the worldsoul should be understood, might be contradicted: not polemically, in the manner of William of Saint-Thierry, but by suggesting a different mode of perception. In their determination to deﬁne, both Williams failed to understand that Endelechia, in her manner of being, “evaded the appearance of truth as if by magic and eluded the grasp of the investigator.”258 If appearances (imago) are illusory and the grasp empty-handed, Bernardus does not shrink from the multiplicity that haunted the truth-criteria of his contemporaries. He ﬁlls their horror of a hermeneutic void with sensual imagery. Noys marries Endelechia to Mundus, uniting the maternal and heavenly natures in a bond as adhesive as glue.259 Number, a key to Thierry of Chartres’ understanding of the Trinity,260 the efﬁcacy of which Bernardus has just doubted in William of Conches’s account of Endelechia, can now be applied, in terms used by the dedicatee of the Cosmographia, to the vir256 “Quis enim tuto difﬁnivit essentiam que consonantiis, que se numeris emoveret?” Ibid., 2, 14, p. 103. 257 “Numeros ergo apposuit, ut perfectionem anime insinuaret . . . est alia ratio quare numeros apposuit. Inter hos enim inveniuntur proportiones, que omnem reddunt consonantiam . . . ut igitur animam corpus concorditer movere signiﬁcaret, numeros concordes in eius compositione posuit.” Jeauneau, ed., pp. 154 – 56. 258 “Cum igitur quodam quasi prestigio veram ymaginem fraudaret, non erat in manibus inspectantis.” Megacosmus, 2, 14, 7– 9, p. 103. 259 “Quod enim spontanea obtusitati subtilitas non accedit, applicatior numerus in virtute complexionis medius intercessit, qui corpus animamque quasi quodam glutino copulisque coniugibus illigavit.” Ibid., 2, 15, p. 103. 260 See E. Jeauneau, “Mathématiques et trinité chez Thierry de Chartres,” in id., Lectio philosophorum, pp. 93 – 99.

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261

tus complexionis. Virtus, not necessitas, is Bernardus’s point. The constraint of a system is not required to overcome a natural reluctance (non spontanea) on the part of what is subtle to connect (complexio) with what is blunt. The structure of the universe, conceived at the level of Bernardus’s personiﬁed principles, transcends the four categories of necessitas and possibilitas devised by Thierry of Chartres, to whom he dedicated his work.262 And by depicting those principles in human and affective terms— by imagining the relationship between Endelechia and Mundus as an arranged marriage in which hostility gave way to agreement and friendship warmed into trust, so that she nursed him in his frequent illnesses and remained faithful even when guests were admitted to the hospitality of their “tabernacle”263 —Bernardus lends a new, non-nominalist sense to Thierry’s proposition nomina . . . essentiant res.264 The being attributed to the things that the Cosmographia declines to present as abstractions is as mutable as the ways in which they are perceived. The implied analogy is between the human mind and artistic form that, adjoined to matter, produces an object of art. Posited by Thierry,265 it is developed by means of the ﬁgurative language he studiously avoided. Yet in description—in the use of various names to characterize the different aspects of reality—Bernardus comes closer to his friend’s approach. Usia, for example, is the “primary substance, eternal persistence, the simplicity fecund of plurality. One and unique, from herself or in herself, she is the entire nature of God, whose inﬁnity of being and majesty no limit can circumscribe. If, in deﬁning this mode of being, you should call it “virtue” or “salvation” or “life,” you would not err.”266 Combining the theory of a single impositio, ﬁxed and stable, with a variety of predication,267 Thierry too employed similar techniques,268 although it was not the names but the 261 262

Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones 2, 9, ed. Häring, Commentaries, p. 157, 4ff. See Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 258ff. and cf. Dronke, “Thierry of Chartres,” pp.

368ff. 263

Megacosmus, 2, 15, p. 103. Lectiones 2, 52, ed. Häring, p. 172, 92. 265 “. . . animus est forma artiﬁcalium specierum. Estque inter animum et materiam sola artiﬁcialis species, que possibile sistens per sui adiunctionem ipsum in artiﬁcium convertit.” Glosa, 2, 34, ed. Häring, p. 276. 266 “Usya namque primeva, eviterna perseveratio, fecunda pluralitatis simplicitas, una est: sola ex se vel in se tota natura dei. Cuius quicquid loci est nec essentie nec maiestatis inﬁnibile circumscribit. Huius modi si virtutem, si salutem, si vitam difﬁniendo dixeris, non errabis.” Megacosmus, 4, 4, p. 117. 267 Commentum 10, ed. Häring, p. 98. 268 E.g., “Quam alii legem naturalem, alii naturam, alii mundi animam, alii iusticiam naturalem, alii ymarmenem nuncupaverunt. At vero alii eam dixere fatum, alii parchas, alii intelligentiam dei. Quod si nullam eius causam attigerimus, ei causarum conexioni minime subiacemus. Et ideo determinata vel ordinis dicitur necessitas hec.” Glosa 21, ed. Häring, p. 273, 34–38. 264

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concepts that lay behind them that engaged his attention. For him as for Bernardus Silvestris, reality possessed an irreducible diversity at the level of physica, where certainty was unattainable. And while Thierry sought, by “physical methods” (ratio physica), to grasp in materia the form and status of things,269 Bernardus strived to convey their metaphysical multiplicity—lending them, in dialectic with the abstract ideas of his dedicatee, the living substance of ﬂesh and blood. Skeletal and bloodless were the analyses of time and eternity that patristic and medieval traditions had bequeathed to them both.270 How then was Bernardus Silvestris to restore to their natural elusiveness concepts that had been discussed with such rigor? Because his answer to this question, at Megacosmus 4, 11, depends on the supple style in which it is expressed, his Latin (translated below) should be appreciated in the original: Ab eternitate tempus initians in eternitatis resolvitur gremium, longiore circulo fatigatum. De unitate ad numerum, de stabilitate digreditur ad momentum. Momenta temporis: presentis instantia, excursus preteriti, expectatio futuri. Has itaque vias itu semper redituque continuat. Cumque easdem tociens et tociens itineribus eternitatis evolverit, ab illis nitens et promovens, nec digreditur nec recedit. Quod ubi ﬁniunt inde tempora renascuntur, relinquitur ad ambiguum que nam precessio in tempore, ut non eadem et consecutio videatur.271

The sense of this passage derives from its verbal artiﬁce: on the rhythmical alternation of cursus velox with majestically slow cadences; on parallelism (ab eternitate / in eternitatis, de / ad), antithesis (nec digreditur nec recedit, praecessio / consecutio), and the semi-erotic undertones of its diction (in [eternitatis] resolvatur gremium, longiore circulo fatigatum).272 But neither Bernardus’s style nor his thought is hermetic.273 If these lines have a model, it is Philosophiae Consolatio 5, pr. 6, 12–13, where Boethius speaks 269

Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 280, 286. See R. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden, 1990), especially pp. 25ff. 271 Dronke, ed., p. 119: “Setting out from eternity, time languishes into the bosom of eternity, wearied by the long circle it has traversed. From oneness it issues forth into number, from stability into momentum. The moment of time: urgency of the present, ﬂowing away of the past, anticipation of the future. By these roads it constantly travels back and forth. And since, on inﬁnitely repeated journeys through eternity, it pursues the same course, striking out and pushing ahead from them, it proceeds neither backward nor forward. And because the endpoint of time’s journeys is where they recommence, it remains ambiguous whether temporal precedence is not to be viewed as identical with temporal sequence.” 272 No note is required on resolvatur and fatigatum. On gremium and circulo, see J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), pp. 92 and 73. 273 See Wetherbee, The Cosmographia, pp. 89 and 155 ad loc., with Stock, Myth and Science, p. 96,n.54. Cf. Alan of Lille’s debts to the Asclepius 30 in the Sermo de sphaera intelligibili, n. 7 ed. D’Alverny, Alain de Lille, Textes inédits (Paris, 1965), pp. 298 – 99. 270

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of “that movement of temporal things” which “from immobility, declines into movement” and of the “inﬁnite journey of time made in such a way that it would continue, by motion, a life the fullness of which it could not embrace by remaining motionless.”274 Here Bernardus’s theme is less the distinction, in the Consolatio, between the eternity of God and the perpetuity of the world, than the qualiﬁcation that precedes it: “if we should wish to impose names on things” or (again in Boethius’s words): “that which cannot be fulﬁlled and expressed.” Time can be understood as instantia, excursus, expectatio; as a journey and a return; as an anticipation, a continuation, or a sequence. Viewed in relation to eternity, both its beginning and its end, temporal movement is equivocal—a multiple seeming, deﬁned negatively and expressed in the dubitative subjunctive: que nam precessio in tempore, ut non eadem et consecutio videatur. Boethius’s paradox thus becomes Bernardus’s ambiguum. Relinquitur ad ambiguum. . . . It is the author of the commentary on Virgil and the Mathematicus who writes—choosing, in the Cosmographia, a subject favored, since the eleventh century, by the dialecticians and theologians who were his rivals.275 Drawing both on Augustine’s discussions of time and eternity in Book 11 of the Confessions and on Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, thinkers as diverse as Anselm, Abelard, and Garland “Compotista” were all preoccupied with the ambiguity of time. Tempus, for Garland, belongs among the equivoca276 —a term analyzable in grammatical and dialectical categories. At a different and more advanced level, it is an object of keen debate among writers such as Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and Hugh of Saint-Victor, whose works were well known to Bernardus Silvestris and whose reinterpretations of Augustine’s doctrine of creation simul277 had direct bearing on the theme of ornatus mundi treated in the Cosmographia. From both the theologians and the dialecticians Bernardus differs, at Megacosmus 4, 11, in order to convey what his rivals could, or would, not perceive.278 Selecting a theme favored by them, he views temporal move274

Bieler, ed., pp. 101–2. See G. R. Evans, “Time and Eternity: Boethian and Augustinian Sources of the Thought of the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries,” Classical Folia 31 (1977), pp. 105–18 and G. Constable, “Past and Present in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Perceptions of Time and Change,” in L’Europa dei secoli xi° e xii°. Fra novità e tradizione. Sviluppi di una cultura (Milan, 1986), pp. 135 –70. Testimonies are collected and translated by M. Parodi, Tempo e spazio nel Medioevo (Turin, 1981), pp. 115ff. 276 Garlandus Compotista, Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk (Assen, 1959), pp. 25 –27. 277 See C. Gross, “Twelfth-Century Concepts of Time. Three Reinterpretations of Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation Simul,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985), pp. 325–38. 278 T. Silverstein, “The Fabulous Cosmology of Bernardus Silvestris,” Modern Philology 46 (1948–49), pp. 92–117. 275

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ment through the relativizing perspective of ambiguity that they sought to minimize or eliminate. The issue, for Bernardus, was not whether the sensible world originated in time, with time, or before time—addressed by William of Conches in his glosses on the Timaeus 279 —but the manner in which mutability could be conceived in relation to an “eternal exemplar.” Bernardus’s solution is poetic. In the verse-prose of the Cosmographia, emphasis is shifted from classiﬁcation of the phenomenon to the imperfection with which it is perceived. Tempus, one of the equivoca, is placed in an equivocal relation to eternitas in order to evoke the transcendent understanding required to appreciate its elusiveness: . . . to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation for the saint.280

Yet on the terrestrial plane, where human beings, the minor mundus, strive to grasp the greater, comprehension is partial and time’s motion becomes a metaphor for all that must be left implicit: relinquitur ad ambiguum. . . . Neither this formula nor this thought, understood as Bernardus intended them, has any place in the relentlessly clear-cut deﬁnitions of the twelfth-century dialecticians and theologians. The idea and its expression belong in the domain where meaning is plural, where philosophy and literature overlap—in that distinct but open realm of interpretive liberty offered by integumentum and guaranteed by ambiguity. Each of Bernardus’s concepts and principles is evoked in human terms that translate, or transpose, metaphysical being into terrestrial realities. Those realities are sensible but not concrete, because indeterminacy is of their essence. If nomina . . . essentiant res, as Thierry of Chartres argued, Bernardus’s aim was to show how that proposition entails multiplicity. Liberated from the constraint of speaking about God, where univocality must prevail, and freed from that horror ambigui that beset his contemporaries, he was able to exploit the advantages of a property of language which they sought to limit. Bernardus’s recreation of myth to portray the workings of celestial powers in the earthly sphere of the microcosm was a product of this view, and his integumental approach is seen to its full advantage at the point where—with a stroke of imaginative boldness that, in Medieval Latin literature, had few parallels and no true precedents—he introduced Urania, traditionally the Muse of astrology, into the second book of the Cosmographia. Urania shares her name, and her parentage, with Eros and Aphrodite in 279 280

Dale, Medieval Discussions, pp. 28ff. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages,” 5, 17–19.

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Symposium.281

Plato’s In his Phaedrus, Urania, together with Calliope, is linked with philosophy and the music of the harmonious spheres.282 These links are not severed by her later patronage of astronomical poetry but maintained and transmitted to the Middle Ages in Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis 283 and in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii.284 Most inﬂuential of all, Fulgentius, to whom Philosophia and Urania are recommended by Thalia as helpers at the beginning of his work,285 deﬁnes her as “Urania, the eighth of the Muses, that is, the heavenly one—after deciding you can choose what to say or reject, for to choose what is useful and reject what is transitory is the mark of a heavenly intelligence.”286 For Fulgentius, she is one of the Muses— allegorically interpreted as doctrinae et scientiae modi—who are the means of attaining the higher truths that connect humankind with the heavenly world.287 These are the strains of interpretation that converge both in Bernardus’s commentary on the Aeneid and in his commentary on Martianus Capella.288 Urania celestis que est intelligentia:289 the allegory is intelligible in terms of Bernardus’s late-antique mythographic and philosophical sources, but not in terms of earlier medieval tradition. When the late Carolingian poet Milo of Saint-Amand, who began his De sobrietate with a conventional rejection of the Muses,290 concluded the list of tituli to his second book with the inscription ﬁnitis titulis Urania musa boabit and went on to praise the 281 Plato, Symposium 180d with K. Dover, A Commentary on Plato’s “Symposium” (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 96ff. ad loc., and Karl Reinhardt, Platos Mythen (Bonn, 1927), pp. 56ff. 282 Plato, Phaedrus, 259d.3 – 4, 6 –7 with G. J. de Vries, A Commentary on the “Phaedrus” of Plato (Amsterdam, 1969), pp. 194f. and C. L. Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s “Phaedrus” (New Haven, 1986), pp. 166– 68 ad loc. For the tradition, see B. Mestwerdt, Virgo Astraea und Venus Urania. Untersuchungen zur Tradition zweier Mythen besonders in der deutschen Literatur bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1972), p. 95. 283 Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, 2.2.4ff., ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1970), p. 107. 284 1, 27–28 and 2, 118, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1983), p. 13 and p. 34. 285 Fulgentius, Mitologiae 1, 22, ed. R. Helm (reprint Stuttgart, 1970), p. 12. 286 Ibid., 2, 48 –49, pp. 26 –27: “Urania octava, id est caelestis—post enim diiudicationem eligis quid dicas, quid despuas; eligere enim utile caducumque despuere caeleste ingenium est.” 287 E. R. Curtius, “Die Musen im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 59 (1939), pp. 129–88, and 63 (1943), pp. 256 – 58 with P. Demats, Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale (Geneva, 1973), pp. 55 – 60, and H. Liebeschütz, Fulgentius Metaforalis. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Mythologie im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1926), pp. 5ff. 288 Jones and Jones, ed., p. 35, 14; 48, 7– 8; Westra, ed., 231, 198; 232, 253– 57; 233, 273. 289 Aeneid-commentary, ed. Jones and Jones, p. 35, 14. 290 Milo of Saint-Amand, De sobrietate, 1, 18 –19, ed. L. Traube in MGH, Poetae latini Aevi Carolini 3 (Berlin, 1896), p. 615.

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Virgin Mary, Urania was already acquiring a special position, invested with some of the traits of the Christian muse. When Sigebert of Gembloux, in the third book of his Passio sanctorum Thebeorum,291 invoked Urania’s aid to celebrate the triumphs of the Thebean martyrs,292 the antithesis caelestia-mundus marked a further stage in her religious identiﬁcation.293 But that process, before the Cosmographia, was never completed. Urania, her distinct status ignored, is treated by the “Loire-poets” in the generation preceding Bernardus’s as an excuse for vacuous play with words. Between the Urania who appears in the Cosmographia and the musa iocosa cultivated by Baudri of Bourgueil294 there is scarcely even a family resemblance. Astrology, fallible purveyor of complex truths, was, as the Mathematicus had shown, unsuitable as a subject with which Urania might be identiﬁed, nor did previous Medieval Latin literature help Bernardus Silvestris in formulating his own approach.295 An alternative was offered, however, by the older mythographic tradition. Fulgentius was pivotal here—not only in his identiﬁcation of Urania celestis but also in Thalia’s recommendation that he follow her and Philosophia: “in order to deal in a lively manner with such secret and mysterious matters” (tam secretis misticisque rebus vivaciter pertractandis).296 Urania could be an initiatrix, a guide, and a leader. Thus the Muses sing their own praises, with her at their head, in Book 2 of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis.297 Urania’s enthronement as regina siderea in the Cosmographia followed naturally from this indeterminate eminence. Indeterminacy remains an essential feature of Urania as she is portrayed 291 Sigebert of Gembloux, Passio sanctorum Thebeorum, ed. E. Dümmler, Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Phil.-hist. Klasse 1 (1893), pp. 44 – 125. 292 “‘De triumpho Thebeorum’: Nostram, docta, velim pulses, Urania, chelim / Tu septem chordis divino pectine motis, / Eia, Thebeum paucis memorato tropheum. / Non opis est nostre per nos celestia nosse, / Tu meminisse potes, tu nota reponere calles, / Pande tuum nomen celestia commemorando. / Mauricius magnus, simul Exuperius almus, / Mundo calcato, mundi quoque principe strato, / Censentur digni celestis honore triumphi.” Ibid., vv. 262–70. 293 See Curtius, “Die Musen,” p. 174 (“für die Heiligendichtung zuständig”) and Mestwerdt, Virgo Astraea, p. 99. 294 Cf. Carm. 154, ed. K. Hilbert, Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina, Editiones Heidelbergenses 19 (Heidelberg, 1979), p. 209, with Curtius, “Die Musen,” pp. 175ff.; G. A. Bond, “Iocus Amoris: The Poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil and the Formation of the Ovidian Subculture,” Traditio 42 (1986), pp. 143– 93, and C. Ratkowitsch, “Io und Europa bei Baudri von Bourgueil,” in Arbor amoena comis. 25 Jahre Mittellateinisches Seminar in Bonn, 1965 – 1990, ed. E. Könsgen (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 155 – 61. 295 Pace the identiﬁcation of Urania and astrology by R. Lemay, Abu Ma’shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century (Beirut, 1962), p. 277. 296 Fulgentius, Mitologie, 1, 22, p. 12. 297 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis, 2, 118, pp. 34ff.

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in the Microcosmus. There Providence summons Natura to marvel at creation and invites her to imagine herself as a reader: “I should like you to see the heaven which, like a book, its pages stretched out in openness, contains the secrets of the future that I have revealed to the gaze of the learned.”298

The promise of legibility (porrectis in planum), qualiﬁed by the comparative eruditioribus, is modiﬁed further by the adjective secretis. The “open book” of the heavens becomes, by the end of the sentence, a hermetic text—accessible to all, but intelligible only to the scholarly few. Then this analogy to the Cosmographia and its audience299 is employed to characterize Urania. Providence commissions Natura to seek out Physis and Urania, in order to collaborate on the task of creating humanity. In doing so, she deﬁnes their respective ranks: “You will ﬁnd Urania in attendance on my throne and Physis living among the lower reaches.”300

Natura, observing this hierarchy, gives precedence to the search for Urania, “because she was of higher rank, and her dwelling-place seemed nearer.” The ﬁrst of these inferences follows from Providence’s words, but not the second. Although Urania, as Natura recognizes, dwells in the heavens, they are measureless: Since Urania is meant to be present in the entire heavens, among all the stars, how was she to know which parts she frequented rather than others?301

The “open book” of the ﬁrmament appearing inscrutable in its inﬁnity, the rhetorical question in which Natura’s quandary is couched eludes a simple answer. Of course Urania is in the skies, among the stars—but that commonplace does not solve Natura’s dilemma. Urania is a queen, she has a will of her own. More than a Muse, more than an allegory, she evades location. Natura’s search for the regina siderea mirrors humanity’s attempt to apprehend a creative principle distinguished by indeterminacy. Her quest leads Natura to Anastros, to the Zones and Colures, and along 298 “Celum velim videas . . . quod quasi librum, porrectis in planum paginis, eruditioribus oculis explicui, secretis futura litteris continentem.” Microcosmus 1, 3, p. 121. 299 Cf. L. Lomperis, “From God’s Book to the Play of the Text in the Cosmographia,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica 16 (1988), pp. 51–71. 300 “Uraniam mearum sedium assistricem, Phisim in inferioribus reperies conversantem.” Microcosmus 3, 3, p. 124. 301 “Cum toti celo debeat, cunctis debeat Urania sideribus interesse, unde sciri potuit quas ex partibus partes excolere potiores.” Ibid., 3, 4.

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the Milky Way. The spectacle of souls weeping in dread at leaving the Tropic of Cancer to assume the graceless garb of the body detains her, et quod queritur non inventa. That liturgical echo is repeated when, reaching Aplanos, the ﬁrmament’s farthest sphere, Natura is ushered into the presence of Urania by Oyarses, chief of the planetary usiarchs in the hermetic Asclepius.302 Assistricem Indigetemque celi Uraniam, quam queritis, eam aspice, declares Oyarses, identiﬁed as Genius, his tone of revelation qualiﬁed by the terms in which he introduces her: “attending closely to the planets and measuring the return of the stars and the byways of time numerically according to precise rules of observation.”303 Has Natura traversed the ﬁrmament only, as the words of Oyarses-Genius imply, to meet the Muse of astrology? The implication is again deceptive; the language again metaphorical. The astral brilliance that dazzles Natura’s gaze is reﬂected in the intuition with which Urania is at last located. And when she addresses her visitor, it is in poetry that goes far beyond its models in Martianus Capella and Macrobius.304 Urania begins by reformulating Providence’s wish that humans be fashioned from corpus and animus. Their bond, expressed in Horatian terms,305 also describes Natura’s relation to herself. Urania, however, is reluctant to acknowledge its consequences, by descending to earth to create humans; and her unwillingness is couched in an inversion of Aeneid 7.126: Terrestrial man is fashioned on earth where he stays as a guest. It is not easy for me to descend there.306

Upward, into the tractus . . . etherios (vv. 31–32), Urania proposes to lead her future creation. Fate and fortune, free will, necessity, and chance are the regions to which she will guide him, ut sit prudentior (v. 32). Astrological knowledge is secondary and subordinate to this moral purpose, for the heavens are charged with divinity and regina, the word earlier employed of Urania, is now applied to the soul, her gift to humans (vv. 39– 40). Divinity is a property of humankind and death, proclaims Urania in metaphors borrowed from Macrobius (Commentary 1, 14, 3 –4), and represents a return to the stars with which humanity is cognate:

302 Ibid., 3, 9, with R. B. Woolsey, “Bernardus Silvestris and the Hermetic Asclepius,” Traditio 6 (1948), p. 343. 303 “sideribus inhiantem, reditusque stellarum et amfractus temporarios sub numerum et ad certas observationis regulas colligentem.” Microcosmus 3, 12, p. 126. 304 Microcosmus 4, pp. 126 –27. Stock, Myth and Science, p. 179, adduces Macrobius’s Commentary 1.11–12; Wetherbee, Cosmographia, p. 158nn.13 and 15; Macrobius 1,14; and Martianus, De nuptiis, 1, 20 –22. 305 See Dronke, ed., Cosmographia, p. 23. 306 Cosmographia, 4, 21–22, p. 126: “In terris homo terrenus fabricabitur hospes. / Et descensus eo michi non levis.”

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The body discarded, he shall return to the stars, divine among the number of heavenly beings.307

So a solution is found to a problem unresolved in the Mathematicus. Twice in that work Patricida had asserted his freedom to commit suicide in the same terms with which Urania now afﬁrms the dignity and destiny of humans.308 What he had perceived as the cause of his existential dilemma, she reduces to an aspect of her cosmological certainties. Astrology poses no threat to the higher harmony that Urania undertakes to expound; it is merely an instrument with which she regulates the workings of the universe. Neither menaced by nor identiﬁed with its techniques, she transcends them to reveal the moral principles glimpsed but not grasped by Patricida. The limitations of the hero of the Mathematicus— the only true “pagan humanist” in Bernardus’s oeuvre—are revealed by the deeper insights mediated by Urania, whom Natura, no grudging admirer, calls divina interpres. For it is here, at the turning point in the second book, that “the interpreter of divine will” usurps the role of a theologian, expounding the task to be undertaken by her and Natura.309 Their agreement is tacit, communicated through gestures rather than words; and when they ascend to the realm of pure and uncontaminated light to gain the assent of the heavenly powers for their sanctum . . . et religiosum opus, they reach the “sacred abode of the supreme and super-essential God, if you trust theological argument.”310 In that pointed parenthesis is indicated the direction in which Bernardus’s poetical style of exposition has been driving. If God, superessentialis, is not susceptible to the deﬁnition nomina . . . essentiant res, when, with the arbitrariness of theological “argument,” his dwelling-place is called a sacrarium, what is the status of that term, what the reality of its reference? All depends on our degree of acceptance of one line of reasoning—on the act of faith (ﬁdes) accorded not to the supreme being but to his interpreters. A different interpretation of metaphysical reality is presented by Bernardus Silvestris, substituting evocation for the prescription of argumenta. While the theologians lay down the law that the credulous obey, he replaces their dubious authority with that of Urania. As unwilling to descend to the earth as they are eager to storm the heights of the empyrean, she, accompanied by Natura, now reverses the 307 “Corpore iam posito connata redibit ad astra, / Additus in numero superum deus.” Ibid., vv. 49–50. 308 See p. 257 and p. 258 above. 309 “Divinam igitur interpretem Natura constupuit, quam et opus et causas operis modumque executionis intelligit exponentem.” Microcosmus 5, 1, p. 127. 310 “Ibi summi et superessentialis Dei sacrarium est, si theologis ﬁdem prebeas argumentis.” Ibid., pp. 127–28.

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traditional journey of the soul to heaven.311 No less signiﬁcant than what both observe is their manner of observation. Urania must temper her pace to Natura, but she easily understands the opposition between the moderate and cold regions of heaven, shuddering with a maiden’s fear at the cruelty of Saturn and marveling magniﬁcentius at the vantage-point on the universe provided by the empire of Clotho, where her companion is entertained merely magniﬁce. Contemplating the iuvenes and virgines who ensure the revolution of the ﬁrmament, Urania apprehends the similarity of their task to her own and longs to remain among them. These are not the attributes of infallible deities, ﬁxed in their relations to one another. Their powers are complementary, their perceptions change, and their understanding is supplemented by other cosmological powers, one of whom is Clotho. Clotho was known, to Bernardus, from Calcidius’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 312 and its discussion of fate and necessity. Control over the planetary spheres is attributed to her by the commentator whose abstract diction is lent concrete reference in the Cosmographia.313 An imperiosi vultus femina, Clotho, the handmaiden of Jupiter, measures and sets in motion the judgments that he weighs in his scales. No distaff was required to recall the spinning fate of ancient myth, for Clotho, in Bernardus’s work, is neither identical with the deity of classical literature nor equated with the planetary principle of Calcidius. Her role is determined by her obedience to the will of Jupiter and, conversely, by her inﬂuence over the process of time. Urania and Natura, in their turn, marvel from her vantage-point and then pass on, their journey still before them. Clotho is no more than a member of Bernardus’s pantheon of cosmic “deities” whose meaning lies in their aggregate. Hence the ambiguity of Urania’s hermetic statement: celum ipsum deo plenum est. Against that background—of the usiarchs and genii of the heavens, of its angels and demons—Urania sings about the divine principle of concord that binds the universe together. In terms adapted from Pythagoras’s speech at Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15.251ff., she celebrates the principle of change which alters, in death, the form of things but not the esse rei. Then she descends from that metaphysical plane toward earth to witness hail and thunder in the atmosphere. At this manifestation of the mutability that she has just commanded Natura to spurn, “Urania was astonished, for she had not been used to anything that was transposible into difference or diver311 See W. Bousset, Die Himmelsreise der Seele (Darmstadt, 1960) [originally in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 4 (1901), pp. 136 – 69, 229 –73]. 312 Calcidius, Timaeus, ed. J. Waszink, in Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi Plato Latinus 4 (London, 1975), pp. 182f. 313 Microcosmus 5, 9, p. 129.

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stability.”314

gent from Unperturbed, she can contemplate death, but rainclouds disturb her sense of order: “The more inconsistent they all were with her habits, the more difﬁculty she had in conceiving and visualizing them.”315 Horriﬁed by the inconstantia of these phenomena, Urania hastens to earth, confused at one level by what she comprehends at another. In Gramision, likened both to a garden and to a pregnant woman,316 Urania and Natura, now joined by Physis, meet to fashion humans at Noys’s command. Her speech in praise of the new being, an amalgam of the principles that each of the three represents, echoes the terms in which Urania had prophesied humanity’s kinship with the stars. But when she comes to participate in our creation with the aid of the mirror of providence, or the mens aeterna, Urania is bafﬂed by the multitude of forms it contains. Silva and Endelichia, the sun and the moon, the planets and the living creatures of the earth are not reﬂected but live in that mirror. Its “diversity of forms greatly exercised Urania and tormented her with worry” before she found it in humanity’s image. So too Natura’s tablet of destiny, which contained “the sequence of things that come to pass by the decrees of fate.” Preserving “multiple vestiges of the divine handwork”—every animal, each species, and all natures—“it hardly revealed the traces of humanity.”317 And the book of memory, succinct and compact, entrusted to Physis allowed the workings of providence and fate to be “intuited (subintelligi) but not perceived.” There exists, in the relativized world of Bernardus’s cosmic principles, no single mechanism that produces understanding of humanity’s creation. Imperfection and indirectness are emphasized by his analogue between the book of memory and the imaginative process portrayed in the Cosmographia itself: “It is none other than the intellect that applies itself to the universe and strains its memory—often with accurate reasoning, but more frequently with probable conjecture.”318 This thought, Platonic in inspiration,319 followed naturally from Bernardus’s dedication of his work to 314 “Urania constupuit, que nichil insueverat in diversa traducibile vel discrepans a tranquillo.” Ibid., 9, 1, p. 138. 315 “Que quidem omnia quantum obvia consuetudini, tantum egra animo, tantum contraria visioni.” Ibid. 316 See J. Jolivet, “Les Principes féminins dans la Cosmographia de Bernard Silvestre,” in L’homme et son univers au Moyen Age, Actes du viie congrès international de philosophie médiévale, ed. C. Wenin (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), pp. 296 – 304. 317 Microcosmus 11, 5, p. 143. 318 “Liber enim recordationis non aliud quam qui de rebus se ingerit et compellat memoriam intellectus ratione sepe veridica, sed probabili sepius coniectura.” Ibid., 11, 10, p. 144. 319 “Atque illud potius observabo, quod initio sermonis precario petivi, in rebus imaginariis proclivibusque ad fallendum rationibus rerum earundem verisimilibus assertionibus imaginariisque contentus sim, initia singulorum et universorum originem pandens.” Calcidius, Timaeus 48d, ed. Waszink, p. 46, 4 –7.

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Thierry of Chartres. There it is stated that “to treat the world or the universe was, in the nature of the theme, difﬁcult,” echoing Thierry’s own words.320 In the ornatus difﬁcilis of the Cosmographia, the difﬁculties of ornatus mundi, never fully describable, can only be evoked. Even the highest of Bernardus’ cosmic principles has a role that does not exceed collaboration. With Natura and Physis, Urania completes the task demanded of her by Noys. She is capable of accomplishing what neither of her helpers achieves, such as expelling the taint of evil from Silva and containing ﬂuid matter within ﬁxed bounds. Her assistance is essential, her understanding higher and more penetrating than that of Natura and Physis—yet Urania cannot determine. Her powers are limited; her wisdom within bounds; for the myth that serves to liberate Bernardus from the constraints of conventional interpretation is a liberating one. Astrology, subordinated by Urania to the metaphysical authority that she mediates, is both the guarantor and the servant of a higher harmony. No longer a threat, it provides the stability for which Patricida, in the Mathematicus, had strived. And at the center of that stability is placed the newly created human ﬁgure, endowed by Natura with some qualities, such as hearing, which beneﬁt him and with others, such as the tongue, which do harm.321 The poem that concludes Bernardus’s book is not an encomium on human dignity, but an earthly—at times ribald—alternative to idealizing interpretations of the book of Genesis. In the mixture of good and ill portrayed in the Cosmographia, there is no room for a deus ex machina, a revelation, or an epiphany. The work does not end with humanity, the new creation, ascending the empyrean to rejoin Urania among, or above, the stars. It closes with an account of the nostrils, the heart, and the liver—and with a celebration of the regenerative power of the penis. By then Urania, with virginal modesty, has disappeared from view. After her departure, Physis “labored mightily” to contain Silva, struggling “not with the elements themselves but with the remains of the elements” discarded after the completion of the universe. “Even a skilled craftsman,” in these circumstances, “could not complete a ﬁnished work.”322 Physis’s efforts offer a parallel to Bernardus’s own. The Gesamtkunstwerk or, as he and other writers were to call it, the opus consummatum represented by the 320 Cosmographia, ed. Dronke, p. 96. Cf. Thierry of Chartres: “Sed quoniam que de rerum universitate proposita sunt maioris indigent inquisitionis quam tractatus presens exigat dimittantur hec interim, quorum explanantionem voluminis integri series expectat.” Commentum, ed. Häring, p. 98, 10. 321 Microcosmus 14, 49ff., pp. 151– 52. Cf. W. Kölmel, “Ornatus mundi—contemptus mundi: zum Weltbild und Menschenbild des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in L’Homme et son univers au Moyen Age, pp. 356 – 64, esp. 360. 322 Microcosmus 13, 4, p. 147.

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Cosmographia323

both embodies its dedicatee’s theory of the concordantia artium and modiﬁes one of Thierry’s methodological principles. He, like Gilbert of Poitiers, had insisted on the rationes propriae, the distinctness of techniques used in each discipline.324 Mathematical reasoning should be applied to mathematical problems, “physical” arguments to questions of physics, theological analysis to divinity.325 Yet in the encyclopedic conception of Bernardus’s work, the limitations of each of these “higher” subjects are suggested by the inferior medium of literature. Matched to the indeterminability of creation, it evokes what they could not capture. A Gesamtkunstwerk on Bernardus’s chosen theme has nothing of the closed system that his contemporaries strived to construct. Open to the mutability of the universe and reﬂecting its plural nature, the integumenta of the Cosmographia express a different, but equally philosophical insight. “Do not look askance or murmur when you read, in the Bible, about the Aethiop maiden with shorn hair and cut nails,” Peter the Chanter would declare. “Despair not: all contradictions are superﬁcial, all difﬁculties in scripture can be smoothed away.” Harmony restored and unity established, he assured his readers that “it will be possible to arrive at simplicity of interpretation.”326 That simplicity, that univocality, that concord were aims shared by generations of twelfth-century thinkers and would long remain goals of scholastic philosophy. Aware of this dominant tendency, Bernardus Silvestris offered an original alternative. In the ambiguity that others viewed as an irksome aspect of language or a vexed problem of logic, he detected a quality, positive and ineradicable, of metaphysical being. Where they called a halt, he pressed ahead in his mythopoeic medium. For this Platonist with little Plato conceived how, beneath the level of the divine mysteries on which he did not trespass, “the soul and the powers of the air and heaven” might move in the poetic freedom of indeterminacy.

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See above, p. 161. Cf. above, p. 133. 325 Cf. Speer, Entdeckte Natur, pp. 284ff. 326 Ed. F. Giusberti, Materials for a Study on Twelfth-Century Scholasticism (Naples, 1982), p. 109, 3–10. Cf. C. Valente, “Artes du discours et ‘sacra pagina’ dans le ‘De tropis loquendi’ de Pierre le Chantre,” Histoire. Epistemologie. Langue 12 (1990), pp. 69 –102 and Phantasia Contrarietatis. Contraddizioni scritturali, discorso teologico e arti del linguaggio nel “De tropis loquendi” di Pietro Cantore († 1197), Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi. Testi e studi 13 (Florence, 1997), pp. 113ff. 324

H

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E KNEW EVERYTHING that is to be known”: so concludes, in the encyclopedic spirit of the Parisian masters, an epitaph on magister Alan of Lille († 1203).1 Half a millennium later, his reputation for learning saved this champion of the faith from condemnation as a heretic. It was a near squeak. Since 1694 moves had been made, in the Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books, to proscribe Alan on account of the Explanationes in prophetias Merlini attributed to him.2 No, no, objected one of the erudite censors. It was unthinkable that the doctor universalis had committed such a gross error. Research was undertaken, chronology compared and, on 23 December 1700, the accused was found innocent. If no one was above suspicion in the last and most impregnable bastion of orthodoxy, at least Alan of Lille had been saved, by scholarly methods of which he would have approved, from the anathema with which, during his own lifetime, he had not hesitated to threaten others. The author of the Anticlaudianus also wrote a tract on heresy. The “axiomatic theologian” of the Regulae caelestis iuris who insisted, in his Summa “Quoniam homines” and Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum, on the need to establish plainly the separate senses of every term, composed, early in his long career as an author, De planctu Nature—stylistically one of the most exotic works of twelfth-century Latin literature. Employing the prosimetric form that had recently been used, to subtle effect, in Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Alan of Lille demonstrated that he was no pupil of the teacher who has been mistaken as his master. The natural order that Bernardus detected behind indeterminacy is replaced, in De planctu Nature, by a chaos of unnatural inversions. For this bitter, if ironical, critic of cosmic eroticism, homosexuality was less the cause than the symptom of a universal malaise, and nature’s perversion was reﬂected in the license of language. Where Bernardus exploited ambiguity and polyvalence, Alan advocated deﬁnition and insisted on the necessity of control. Control of metaphor and limitation of tropes had a further and deeper signiﬁcance,

1 “Qui duo, qui septem, qui totum scibile scivit.” in M.-T. D’Alverny, Alain de Lille, Textes inédits (Paris, 1965), p. 11. Cf. A.Vernet “Une épitaphe inédite de Thierry de Chartres,” in Receuil de travaux offert à C. Brunel 2 (Paris, 1955), pp. 660–70. 2 On the “prophecies of Merlin,” cf. B. Clarke, ed., Life of Merlin. Geoffrey of Moumouth, Vita Merlini (Cardiff, 1973), pp. 18ff.

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since they mirrored the process through which harmony might be restored and stability enforced. Small wonder therefore that, when the doctor universalis fell into the hands of the guardians of the faith, he was acquitted by those whose mentality he had contributed to shape. For Alan of Lille, ﬁve centuries before his own trial, had displayed all the qualities of an intellectual policeman. The process began in the Summa “Quoniam homines” of 1155–60.3 That work opens, like others by this polemical author, with invective against ignorance. Drunk, blind, and presumptuous, those who misuse the liberal arts to confect ﬁgmenta are incapable of making the transition over the “bridge” offered by such humble propaedeutic subjects to the “imperial” realm of theology.4 Lacking the “right guidance” (recta aurigatio) to ascend the heights of the ineffable, they fall into precipices of heresy and ﬂounder before drowning. Unable to understand the proper discourse reserved for divine matters, they rave like the insane. Insanity, for Alan, is a form of excess—a trespass beyond limits guarded by armed sentinels of orthodoxy.5 The insane, the profane, the deviant of this kind are to be warded off from the hallowed precincts of his subject. Alan’s work was composed for an elite of initiates by a hierophant of learning as jealous of his rights and exclusive in his choice of acolytes as Abelard. So the prologue to Summa “Quoniam homines.” 6 So too the opening of the Anticlaudianus.7 If one of Alan’s premises was that nothing is knowable about God,8 there 3

Ed. P. Glorieux, AHDLM 28 (1953), pp. 113 – 369. “Quoniam homines a vera sue rationis dignitate degeneres letheo ignorantie poculo debriati, retento hominis nomine, amisso numine debacchantur oculis orbati mentalibus ad orbita veritatis exorbitant, nec solum liberalium artium iniurintes honori in eis sui erroris imaginantur ﬁgmenta, verum etiam super celestem scientiam sue temeritatis supercilium erigentes theologice facultatis derogant dignitati; qui dum in theologicis divinorum verborum miraculosas signiﬁcationes obstupescunt, in eis miraculosa conﬁngunt monstruosa. . . . Qui dum vix scenicas et theatrales scientias comprehendere possunt, divinis colloquiis et angelicis disputationibus interesse contendunt; sicque liberalium artium non preconsulentes scientiam, non earum recta aurigatione deducti, dum ad ineffabilia conscendunt, in varios errores ineffabiliter ruinosi descendunt. Cumque liberalium artium ponte introductorio in imperialem theologice facultatis regiam intruduntur, in varias hereses et in varia hereseos precipicia detrusi naufragantur.” Prologue 1, ed. Glorieux, p. 119. 5 “Nos ergo qui theologie proﬁtemur militiam, ex sanctorum patrum auctoritatibus ﬁrmamenta sumentes, cum sancto Moyse circa montes sacre scripture terminos statuamus, ultra quos nemini, qui civis theologicus est, concedatur progressus.” Ibid., p. 120. 6 “Indignis vero nostri tractatus claudatur intelligentia; attestante enim Aristotele: “minuit secretorum maiestatem qui indignis secreta divulgat”; nec fas est, ut Dionisii testantur eloquia, in porcos projicere invisibilium margaritarum inconfusum et luciforme beneﬁcumque ornatum. Ab hoc etiam opere demolientium emulorum arceatur accessus, ne eorum venenosis obiectaminibus eclipsim nostri operis patiatur igniculus.” Ibid. 7 See below, pp. 309ff. 8 Summa 1,3, ed. Glorieux, p. 123. 4

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should be no recourse to involucra or integumenta in attempting to fathom the divine mysteries. “Catholics,” he was to write in the thirty-fourth of the Regulae celestis iuris which immediately precede his epic, “ought to avoid verborum involucra.”9 (A rap on the knuckles for the likes of Bernardus Silvestris, who had employed such “veiled speech” assiduously.) Instead the theologian should seek, with a due sense of decorum, language in keeping with his elevated theme. That raised a piquant problem. What kind of diction, which type of style was suitable for one who chose to discourse on unnatural vice in De planctu Nature? De planctu Nature, unlike the Distinctiones and De ﬁde catholica contra hereticos, has no dedication. Alan neither enlisted the support nor requested the protection of a lay or ecclesisastical patron for his “handbook” (enchiridion). It was issued on his own authority, laconically expressed in a title used throughout his works. Magister Alanus offered De planctu naturae to its readers as a product of the schools. In the Parisian schools for which it was destined, Grammatica was linked to Ethica, and literature served a moral purpose.10 Since this master detected about him immorality and corruption, it followed from his premises that only a prose of decadence and a verse of perversion were able to reﬂect the disruption of the natural order. Hence a tension between Alan’s urge to clarity and the obscurity of his style, invested with the qualities of allusiveness, complexity, and wordiness that its author condemned in public preaching. Hermetic language, in such an “open” context, exuded an odor of heresy. Accessibility was Alan’s criterion, indicated by the adjective “public” that had been used to condemn Abelard. Not a private exposition, secret and suspect, but a “public” discourse, intelligible to all, should be the aim of the preacher.11 When he spoke, he was to avoid the tricks of the oratorical trade that Alan compares with the mimicry of a showman or the antics of a jongleur.12 Each type of subject, each level of audience is classi9 “Debet enim verborum involucra cavere katholicus. Ut etiam rei, de qua loquimur, sit consonus. Debet enim theologus habere sermones cognatos rebus, de quibus loquitur.” Ed. N. Häring, AHDLM 56 (1981), pp. 97–226, esp. 148. 10 See above, p. 156 and n. 36. 11 “Si enim praedicatio occulta esset, suspiciosa esset, et videretur redolere haeretica dogmata. In concionabulis enim suis latenter haeretici praedicant, ut facilius alios decipiant. Publica debet esse, quia non uni, sed pluribus proponenda est. Si enim uni tantum proponeretur, non esset praedicatio, sed doctrina.” Summa de arte praedicatoria, PL 219, 111–12 with M. Zink, “La Rhétorique honteuse et la convention du sermon ad status à travers la Summa de arte praedicatoria d’ Alain de Lille,” in Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jakemart Giélée et leur temps, ed. H. Roussel (Lille, 1980), pp. 171– 85, and G. Bartola, “La tecnica della predicazione in due sermoni di Alano di Lilla,” SM 27 (1986), pp. 609 – 36. 12 PL 210, 112 and 163.

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ﬁed in his tract. And there is one kind of hearer whom he admonishes to match words with deeds: the doctores.13 To them and their pupils Alan addressed his enchiridion, in which the verbal act, defying such regulae, ironizes its own medium. Neither strictly literal nor wholly metaphorical, the game played with language in De planctu Nature is conducted according to rules of its own. Despite the solemn ethical tone, it is a sport for insiders; and when the high priest of scholarship invites his readers to weep at the beginning of his work,14 he expects a complicit smile. Not only a grammaticus, in the full and extended sense of the term, presents De planctu Nature to his studious audience,15 but also a reader of the Cosmographia, beginning where Bernardus Silvestris had left off. His prosimetrum ends with an exuberant image of regeneration through the membrum virile. Not by chance does Alan of Lille open with a lament on sodomy and sterility. Little love was lost between the doctor universalis and the teacher of Tours whom he both criticized and emulated.16 Emulation implied an alternative. A polymath with vaunting ambitions needed to outclass the encyclopedic standard set by the Cosmographia, and language offered the key. If Bernardus had married style to sense with consummate art, Alan, in subdued polemic with his predecessor, would do the same differently. Antithesis voices not only Alan’s opposition to Bernardus, but also his distinctive approach. The indeterminacy, the evasion of clear-cut categories in the Cosmographia are replaced, in De planctu Nature, by the negations and corrections of the sic et non-method. When Natura makes her début in the second chapter, she is described in terms of contraries. Her hair “gleams not with borrowed but with natural brilliance.” Defying comparison to an image of radiance, it is equated with the real thing.17 Non . . . sed: Alan of Lille’s scholastic style, informed by the cut-and-thrust of the disputatio, retains a debater’s directness even in treating obliquity. When, for example, 13

PL 210, 184 De planctu Nature 1,1ff., ed. N. Häring, SM 19 (1978), pp. 397– 879, esp. 806, translated by J. Sheridan, Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 26 (Toronto, 1988). On the interpretation of this work, see W. Wetherbee, “The Function of Poetry in the De planctu Naturae of Alain de Lille,” Traditio 25 (1969), pp. 85 –125 and id., Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Inﬂuence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972), pp. 188–211. Cf. J. Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 13ff. 15 See above, p. 160. 16 See D’Alverny, Alain de Lille, pp. 20 –21. 17 “Cuius crinis, non mendicata luce sed propria scintillans, non similitudinarie radiorum representans efﬁgiem sed eorum claritate nativa naturam preveniens, in stellare corpus caput efﬁgiabat puelle; quem duplex tricatura difﬁbulans, superna non deserens, terre non dedignabatur osculo arridere.” De planctu Nature, 2, ed. Häring, pp. 808 – 9, 3ff. 14

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he describes the cross-wise angle at which Natura’s haircut falls, he stresses the harmony of the whole.18 Deviance is not permitted. A legitimus ordo is imposed. If unconventional proportions establish a discordia concors between Natura’s regular features and slanting locks, the effect is deﬁned as a paralogismus, because what is meant is the match achieved in paradox. For paradox does not depend on the apprehensions of Alan’s readers— compelled, by the intricacy of his prose, to follow the lead of its author. Paradox is ﬁrst constructed, then explained by the writer himself. Laying down his own interpretations, he asserts hermeneutic control. Control is exercised over ambiguity, viewed as a potential threat. Natura, although joyful in her beauty, is wracked by grief.19 To express the same idea, Alan of Lille did not need the qualiﬁcatory antithesis of quamvis and tamen. He insists, with the ponderousness of a pedant determined to remove any trace of the implicit. The ekphrasis of Natura’s crown emphasizes that it is the genuine article, not a fake or a counterfeit.20 Dazzling the gaze with the false light of sophistry, ipsius nobilitas ministrabat essentiam. From the opposition between meretricious bombast and sincere speech in which the diadema is visualized, congruence emerges between Alan’s use of language and his view of reality. If this radical realist employs obliquity, it is only to discard it. The rejection is calculated, yet imagination is not lacking. The term fantasia recurs. At the visual level, the doctor universalis is fertile of ideas. Nature’s robe, so ﬁne-spun, so “elusive to the gaze” that “you would have thought it made of air,” was embroidered with a “council” of birds. They are perceived as the eye apprehends a “picture in a dream,” where the “civil war” between the falcon and the heron can be described in Juvenal’s words (3.289) as “you beating and I merely beaten.” “That does not deserve to be classiﬁed as a battle,” comments Alan of Lille in his own words, none of which are needed.21 But the sense, plain in its context, must be spelled 18

“Quoddam vero liliosi tramitis spacium, sub obliquitate decusata crinis dividebat litigium. Nec illa, inquam, obliquitas vultus detrimento preerat sed decori. Crinale vero aureum, in legitimi ordinis choream crinis aurum concilians, vultum mirabatur invenisse conformem. Fantasia etenim coloris aurum consequentis utrumque paralogismum visui concludebat.” Ibid., p. 809, 7–12. 19 “Et quamvis tanta esset pulcritudinis leticia, huius tamen risum decoris ﬂetus inestimabilis extinguere conabatur.” Ibid., p. 809, 35– 36. 20 “Cuius non adulterina auri materies, ab ipsius honore degenerans, luce sophistica oculos paralogizans sed ipsius nobilitas ministrabat essentiam.” Ibid., p. 810, 41– 43. 21 “Hec autem nimis subtilizata, subterfugiens oculorum indaginem, ad tantam materie tenuitatem devenerat, ut eius aerisque eandem crederes esse naturam. In qua, prout oculos in picture imaginabatur sompnio aerii animalis celebrabatur concilium. Illic aquila primo iuvenem, secundo senem induens, tercio, in statum reciprocata priorem, in Adonim revertebatur a Nestore. Illic accipiter, civitatis prefectus aerie, violenta tirannide a subditis redditus exposcebat. Illic milvus, venatoris induens histrionem, venatione furtiva lar-

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out in order to satisfy his drive to deﬁnition. It is not that the doctor universalis is insensitive to the problem of ambiguity. Rather, he cannot tolerate it. The lark, like a noble harpist, derived his musical expertise “not from artiﬁcal studies but the teaching of Nature.” The bat, demoted to the lowest avian rank, was a hermaphrodite among birds. And in case his readers have not grasped that, by the imposition of labels or the use of antithesis, all equivocality can be eliminated and every doubt dispelled, Alan instructs them on how to construe the multiple levels of ﬁgurative language: “Although these beings seemed there to lead an allegorical existence, nonetheless they appeared to live in the same place literally.”22 Literally rooted to the spot by the double ibi, Alan’s style possesses no power of evocation. Nor does he want it. Deﬁning a mode of perception at two removes from reality, he is exact in measuring the distance. The ﬁgures which, by a “trope of painting,” he visualizes on the mantle “seemed miraculously to be swimming.” The picture exercised its own “bewitchment” (incantatio).23 Like one of those productions on the stage which he decries in his tract on preaching, the animals represented on Nature’s robe offered a feast to “the eyes of the beholders.” The plural is misleading, for Alan’s imagined audience consists in one. “I,” he adds, cannot establish “by any certain authority” how Natura’s shoes and underwear were decorated. “Slight probability” licenses him to conjecture that pictures of herbs and trees may have adorned the deity’s nether regions. And lest his browbeaten readers have not seen the joke in this parody of the language of logic, Alan of Lille repeats his previous distinction between certitudo and probabilitas.24 The rest he passes over in silence. The rest is nothing at all. Reducing the grand sweep of ﬁgurative language to a miniature of pictorial representation, he focuses on its brushvam gerebat accipitris. Illic falco in ardeam bellum excitabat civile, non tamen equali lance divisum. Non enim illud pugne debet appellatione censeri, ubi “tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum.” Ibid., p. 813,143–45-p. 814, 146 – 54. 22 “Illic alauda quasi nobilis cytharista, non studii artiﬁcio sed Nature magisterio musice predocta scientiam, citharam presentabat in ore que, tonos in tenues subtilizans particulas, semitonia usque in gumphos invisibiles dividebat. Illic vespertilio, avis hermafroditica, cifre locum inter aviculas obtinebat. Hec animalia quamvis ibi quasi allegorice viverent, ibi tamen esse videbantur ad litteram.” Ibid., p. 816,189 –195. 23 Ibid., p. 817, 228 –29; 235 – 36. 24 “Has animalium ﬁguras hystrionalis ﬁgure representatio, quasi iocunditatis convivia, oculis donabat videntium. Quid vero in caligis camisiaque, in superioribus vestibus consepultis, picture sompniaret industria, nulla certitudinis auctoritata probavi. Sed tamen, ut quedam fragilis probabilitatis remedia docuerunt, opinor in herbarum arborumque naturis ibi picture risisse lasciviam: illic arbores nunc tunicis vestiri purpureis, nunc comis criniri virentibus, nunc ﬂorum parturire redolentem infantiam, nunc in fetum senescere potiorem. Sed quoniam solius probabilitatis lubrico, non certitudinis ﬁde, huius seriem picturationis agnovi, hanc sub silentii pace sepultam pretereo.” Ibid., p. 819,279 – 88.

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strokes. Through the magnifying-glass of Alan’s mania for analogy, the linguistic image exercises its dubious charm with an art repeatedly compared to sophistry. That is how he again refers to the effect for which he strives in the second metrum.25 When Natura appears before him, he is struck by a trance. Cured from his “illness” by her “honey-sweet discourse,” he listens to her “archetypal words.”26 Alan’s Natura does not speak like Bernardus’s cosmic principle. “Ideally preconceived,” her language voices certainties. Those certainties reﬂect the paradoxical structure of the universe: unity in plurality, harmony in disharmony, agreement in disagreement of the four elements.27 No doubt clouds Natura’s conﬁdence about the truths that she imparts, no indeterminacy qualiﬁes her leading role. Vicaria Dei of the “imperial” creator,28 she elbows aside intermediary powers. Clearing from his cosmos the debris of potestates imagined by Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille eliminates any trace of relativism in the Cosmographia. Yet it is clear, from Natura’s own declaration, that her capacity is limited and her authority inferior. To God she defers, before theology she bows. If that subject establishes reason by the truths of faith, she merely formulates faith’s truths reasonably.29 The alienation from, and rejection of, Bernardus Silvestris’s pointed parenthesis si theologis ﬁdem prebeas argumentis 30 could hardly be more striking. Equally evident is the acknowledgment of rational argument and the desire to conﬁne its scope. Below the level of supreme—of theological—authority and subordinate to its dictates, Natura, in the spirit of Alan’s contemporary, Peter the Chanter, expresses the views of their milieu.31 Critical of disputatio and quaestio, she humbly accepts the truths that theology deﬁnes. And because that acceptance is voiced in an enchiridion of the liberal arts, the transition from them to the theological imperium is effected by a bridge as securely orthodox as the author of Summa “Quoniam homines” could have wished.32 The authority on which Alan “trumpets” his message is that of Aristotle proclaiming that “he who divulges secrets to the undeserving commits lèsemajesté.”33 This language of exclusion, which ﬁnds parallels in the pro25 “Hee sunt veris opes et sua pallia, / Telluris species et sua sidera / Que pictura suis artibus edidit, / Flores efﬁgians arte sophistica.” Ibid., p. 820, 21–24. 26 Ibid., 6, p. 824 –25,12. 27 Ibid., p. 826, 43 – 45. 28 Ibid., p. 827, 75ff. 29 Ibid., p. 829, 128ff. 30 See above. 31 See J. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants. The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle 1 (Princeton, 1970), pp. 88ff., especially 96f. 32 See above, p. 289. 33 “Aristoteliceque auctoritatis tuba proclamat quia ille ‘maiestatem minuit secretorum qui indignis secreta divulgat’.” De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 829, 126 –27.

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logues to Summa “Quoniam homines” and Anticlaudianus, also has a legal resonance. The equation of heresy with treason, on the model of Roman law, by the jurisprudence of the later twelfth century served to clarify a previously muddled debate.34 Here, in the context of one of the most eloquent apologias for theology’s primacy written during the High Middle Ages, the same idea lends fresh emphasis to the link, drawn by Abelard, between the learning of an intellectual elite and the defense of the faith. At one with him, with Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury in his disdain for the unworthy multitude and his desire to preserve the separateness of the chosen few, the doctor universalis canvases, in a literary work, the claims of the discipline that surpasses literature. The hierophant becomes the recruiter, showing potential initiates the way. In this sense, Alan of Lille’s enchiridion employs the liberal arts as a propaedeutic to the higher discipline of theology. If understanding of theology depends on precise use of language, the converse also holds: solecism, “barbarism,” and error have theological and moral implications. Incest and bestiality, lust and bisexuality can be likened, with an array of mythological examples, to aberrations in gender or to the interchangeability of subject and predicate.35 The “grammar of Venus,” like her “school of logic,” leads to arid debates and perverse conclusions.36 Transposing his ethical message into terms familiar to Parisian students, this able dialectican casts doubt on disputationes of the schools. To convey disgust at such “brothels” of immodesty, Natura, Alan’s mouthpiece, draws attention to the excesses of her own language. “Do not be surprised,” she warns him, “if I go beyond the limits in using these words of profane novelty, when the profane men dare to rave with such profanity.”37 The repetition underscores the paradox that, in order to ﬁnd the terms suited to the subject that Alan’s theory of consonantia required, Natura must voice prophanas novitates. Deploring sexual misconduct, the servant of orthodoxy employs the diction of a heretic. When her interlocutor cites, in her own mythological style, the instances of Ganymede, Bacchus, and Apollo drawn from poetry, Natura censures these “shadowy ﬁgments . . . of the poetic art.”38 Figmenta without sub34 See O. Hageneder, “Der Häresiebegriff bei den Juristen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages: (11th–13th Centuries) ed. W. Lourdaux (Louvain, 1976), pp. 42–103 and “Die Häresie des Ungehorsams und das Instehen des hierokratischen Papsttums,” Römische Historische Mitteilungen 20 (1978), pp. 29 – 47. 35 De planctu Nature 8, ed. Häring, p. 834, 53ff. 36 Ibid., p. 835, 83ff. 37 “Non igitur mireris, si in has verborum prophanas exeo novitates, cum prophani homines prophanius audeant debachari.” Ibid., p. 836, 94 – 96. 38 “Tunc illa, autentice severitatis vultu vultus vultuositate ﬁgurans, ait: ‘An interrogationem, que nec dubitationis faciem digna est usurpare, questionis querendo vestis imagine, an umbratilibus . . . ﬁgmentis, que artis poetice depinxit industria, ﬁdem adhibere conaris?

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stance offer naked falsehood, disguised by an appearance of probability. Yet the medium is ambivalent, for the outer shell of error may contain an inner truth, such as the rent in Natura’s garment which symbolizes the violence done to her by humanity.39 All depends on the discernment brought to bear on a subject that may be repulsive in itself. It follows that, if she has matched profanity with the profanitas of rational language, the criterion of consonantia should not continue to dominate. There is also the “cloak” (pallium), the covering, or the shroud of mystical speech to which Natura, like twelfth-century theologians before Alan of Lille, has to resort, in order to gild “things immodest with the golden trappings of modest words.”40 Aware, like them, that even this “higher style” is insufﬁcient to express the ineffable truths of the faith, Natura seeks to express the inexpressible.41 Deﬁning the ineffable, describing the indeterminable, Alan of Lille resorts to a parody of Bernardus Silvestris. The ﬁfth metrum in chapter 9 of De planctu Nature resolves into paradox the allusiveness of Megacosmus 3.42 Where Bernardus depicted a cosmic order guaranteed by heavenly harmony, Alan detected contraries and inversions, strife and chaos. In his poetic vision of a world in which night is sunlit and day obscured with darkness, spring hivernal, and Aeneas a new Nero, the irrationality of reason is attributed to the malign power of Venus. So it is that the cosmic eroticism Nonne ea, que in puerilibus cunis poetice discipline discuntur, altiori discretionis lima senior philosophie tractatus eliminat? An ignoras quomodo poete sine omni palliationis remedio auditoribus nudam falsitatem prostituunt, ut quadam mellite delectationis dulcedine velut incantatas audientium aures inebrient? Aut ipsam falsitatem quadam probabilitatis ypocrisi palliant, ut per exemplorum imagines hominum animos inhoneste morigerationis incude sigillent? Aut in superﬁciali littere cortice falsum resonat lira poetica, interius vero auditoribus secretum intelligentie altioris eloquitur, ut exteriori falsitatis abiecto putamine dulciorem nucleum veritatis secrete intus lector inveniat’.” Ibid., p. 837, 123–136. 39 Ibid., p. 838, 164 –72. 40 “Tunc illa: ‘Si sementitiam huius pestis originem uelis agnoscere, altius mentis accendas igniculum, appetentius intelligendi repares appetitum. Hebetudinem ingenii depellat subtilitas, cogitationum ﬂuctus attentionis conpescat stabilitas. Ab altiori etenim sumens inicium excellentiorique stilo mee uolens seriem narrationis contexere, nolo ut prius plana uerborum planicie explanare proposita uel prophanis uerborum nouitatibus prophanare prophana, uerum pudenda aureis pudicorum uerborum faleris inaurare uariisque uenustorum dictorum coloribus inuestire. Consequens enim est predictorum uiciorum scorias deauratis locutionibus purpurare uiciorumque fetorem odore uerborum inbalsamare melliﬂuo, ne si tanti sterquilinii fetor in nimie promulgationis auras euaderet plerosque ad indignationis nauseantis uomitum inuitaret. Sed tamen aliquando, ut superius libauimus, quia rebus de quibus loquimur cognatos oportet esse sermones, rerum informitati locutionis debet deformitas conformari. In sequenti tamen tractatu, ne locutionis cacephaton lectorum offendat auditum uel in ore uirginali locum collocet turpitudo, predictis uiciorum monstris euphonia orationis uolo pallium elargiri.’” Ibid., p. 839, 179 – 95. 41 Ibid., p. 841, 242– 44. 42 Häring, ed., p. 824ff. and Dronke, ed., p. 104ff.

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of Bernardus’s masterpiece is depicted, in De planctu Nature, as the root of that evil which should be rejected on “pain of anathema.” Intellectual excommunication is threatened to those who usurp the authority to make philosophical statements that go beyond the bounds of their discipline.43 Exceeding his own, this pupil of Gilbert of Poitiers invokes the theory of the rationes propriae developed from Boethius by his master.44 Just as each subject should know its place, so behavior in bed is governed by rules and precepts. Between scholarship and sexuality a parallel is drawn. Error in love, like abuse of grammar, severs a natural bond. To transgress such limits is to commit an act of heresy that incurs the penalty of severance from the well-ordered community. Regulation of conduct in the state, matched by control over the distinct forms of learned discourse in the res publica litterarum, is Alan of Lille’s ideal. Expressed in a tone of solemn jocularity, its purpose is authoritarian. This policeman of the intellect aspires to promotion as inquisitor. A tract on social order, a disquisition on ethics, and a discourse on the hierarchy of knowledge that places theology at the summit and consigns homosexuality to the depths, De planctu Nature also contains a series of experiments in levels of style.45 Natura, a magisterial ﬁgure as didactic as magister Alanus himself, is presented as a theorist of writing, who refers to metrum 5 as an “artistic exposition” of her teaching. Her readers are to learn from “the book of experience.”46 If the harshness of her lesson is tempered by the humor of learned “jests and jokes,” laughter is not its most salient effect. For in the ascent from a “historical discourse” adapted to the pupil’s naïveté (puerilitas), Venus is equipped with a “mighty pen” to write about the rerum genera according to the rules of Natura’s orthography. 43 “Nec mirandum si plereque maxime titulo gramatice facultatis ascripte a Veneree artis domicilio paciantur repulsam, cum ipsa eas, que sue preceptionis regulis obsequuntur, in sinus sue familiaritatis admittat, eas vero, que eloquentissime contradictionis insultibus eius leges expugnare conantur, eterni anathematis exclusione suspendat, philosophice etiam assertionis auctoritas maximarum plerasque diversis facultatibus fateatur esse communes, quasdam vero ultra suarum disciplinarum domicilia nullam habere licentiam excursandi.” De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 847, 73 – 80. 44 See M. Dreyer, “Regularmethode und Axiomatik. Wissenschaftliche Methodik im Horizont der artes-Tradition des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Scientia und ars im Hochmittelalter und Spätmittelalter, ed. I. Craemer-Ruegenberg and A. Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia (Berlin, 1994), pp. 145–57. 45 On Alan of Lille’s levels of style, see F. Quadlbauer, Die antike Theorie der Genera dicendi im lateinischen Mittelalter (Vienna, 1962), pp. 82– 86. 46 “Iam ex hoc mee doctrine artiﬁcio tibi cupidinarie artis elucescit theorica. Per librum vero experientie tibi practicam poteris conparare. Nec mirandum si in pretaxata Cupidinis depinctione notulas reprehensionis intersero, quamvis ipse michi quadam germane consanguinitatis ﬁbula connectatur.” De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 845, 1– 5.

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Not the slightest deviance is permitted from her norm. Wanderers from the path of “proper description” are condemned as trespassers of pseudography.47 Natura is conceived as a mistress of writing, so that her subject can be overseen. Censorship is the aim of her prescriptive activity, characterized as an “imperial” version of magistralis disciplina.48 Discipline and authority are the standards she seeks to impose on the tumult of experience. Sexual or literary, it is all of a piece. Disorder cannot be tolerated. For Hyle there is no place. She, or what she stood for in the Cosmographia, needs to be refashioned and classiﬁed according to the canons of Alan’s moral magisterium. And while his style is indirect or obscure because “vice glosses itself openly,”49 openness is stripped of its ambivalence and employed in the negative sense that it acquired during the heresy-trial of Peter Abelard.50 Unintelligible to the vulgar multitude at which Alan repeatedly sneers, the true integumentum formed by his hermetic work is governed by the “charioteer” of reason.51 It is that (originally Platonic) metaphor of control52 which justiﬁes his own licentia excursandi. Licence is not licentiousness, close though the resemblance may be. When Alan writes about “feet incarcerated in the cramped prison of shoes,” he is exemplifying the “twisting of verbosity and bombast.”53 Describing Chastity’s robe in protracted detail, he intervenes “to compress in the brief course of my narrative this elusive and wordy pictorial account.”54 No more ironical words are to be found in De planctu Nature. Verbosity is of its essence. Yet Alan’s claim is also true, because his subterfugientia . . . 47 “Ad ofﬁcium etiam scripture calamum prepotentem eidem fueram elargita, ut in competentibus cedulis eiusdem calami scripturam poscentibus quarum mee largitionis beneﬁcio fuerat conpotita iuxta mee orthographie normulam rerum genera ﬁguraret, ne a proprie descriptionis semita in falsigraphie devia eumdem devagari minime sustineret.” Ibid., p. 845, 30–846,34. 48 “Sed cum ipsa, genialis concubitus ordinatis complexionibus, res diversorum sexuum oppositioni dissimiles ad exequendam rerum propaginem connectere teneretur, ut in suis connectionibus artis grammatice constructiones canonicas observaret suique artiﬁcii nobilitas nullius artis ignorantia sue ferret glorie detrimentum, curialibus preceptis sub magistrali disciplina, eam velut discipulam instruendam docui, quas artis grammatice regulas in suarum constructionum unionibus artiﬁciosis admitteret, quas velut extraordinarias nullius ﬁgure excusatione redemptas excluderet.” Ibid., p. 846, 35– 42. 49 “Nam sese vicium glosat aperte.” Ibid. 11, p. 851,35. 50 See above, p. 7 and 70. 51 Ibid., 13, p. 859,70. 52 See Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli (Princeton, 1998), p. 63. 53 “Pedes in angustis calceorum ergastulis carcerantur. . . . Nam audatiam furori temeritatis assignat, prudentiam aut in fraudis versucias aut in verbositatis ampullositatem obliquat.” De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 861,40 and 63 – 64. 54 “Et ut brevi narrationis tramite subterfugentia picture multiloquia conprehendam. . . .” Ibid., p. 867,65 – 66.

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multiloquia are contained within clear and explicit limits. Stylistic virtuosity being permissible in an ekphrasis, its author is obliged to check his prolixity only when it ventures beyond bounds. That act of self-restraint teaches a lesson in literary proprietas. The text and therefore the writer are instructed on how to defer to context. The context of De planctu Nature is represented as a chain of exterior authorities.55 For the internal dynamics of literature, Alan of Lille has no time at all. He equates them with lawlessness and condemns them root and branch. But he is not so rash as to identify Natura with the ultimate tribunal for, over her normative powers, there can be appeal to the supreme potestas of God. Conscious of her own limits, she is free to anathematize56 yet, in order to pronounce her excommunication, this vicaria Dei, like the pope—from whose title Natura’s is borrowed—needs the assistance of a grand inquisitor. To Genius, who serves her “in a priestly ofﬁce,” is assigned the “judiciary power” of prohibition. Offenders, like books, are to be “removed” from her “catalogue” and banished beyond its “conﬁnes.”57 Exile, proscription, condemnation: the language of censorship and heresy is echoed by Genius, at the end of the work, when he carries out Natura’s “imperial edict” and “strikes” deviants with the sword of an “anathema” forged—of course—according to the rules.58 A sacerdotal servant executing the orders of a papal power closes De planctu Nature. In the sentence delivered by Natura and carried out by Genius is mirrored a movement in the clerical culture of the High Middle Ages—away from the Platonizing pluralism of Bernardus Silvestris to the regulative univocality of scholasticism. In lieu of the celestes aerieve potestates that freely collaborate with one another in the Cosmographia, Usia, Noys, and their companions are marshaled, at the end of Alan’s work, into ranks. There they enforce the “rule of Venus.” Not the goddess of sensual love but the protector of sexual order is invoked, as the eroticism of the Cosmographia is replaced by a catalogue of vices as somber as Alan of Lille’s tract on that subject.59 Sharing Peter the Chanter’s interest in questions of 55 Cf. A. Bartòla, “Filosoﬁa, teologia, poesia nel De planctu Nature e nell’ Anticlaudianus di Alano di Lilla,” Aevum 41 (1988), pp. 228 – 58, esp. 240ff. 56 “Sed quia excedere limitem mee virtutis non valeo nec mee facultatis est huius pestilentie virus omnifariam extirpare, mee possibilitatis regulam prosecuta, homines predictorum viciorum anfractibus irretitos anathematis cauteriabo caractere.” De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 870,171– 871,173. 57 Ibid., p. 871,175 with D. Baker, “The Priesthood of Genius,” Speculum 51 (1976), pp. 277–91 and J. Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1975). 58 De planctu Nature, ed. Häring, p. 877,119 –23, p. 878, 138f. 59 See O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale au xiie et xiiie siècles 6 (Gembloux, 1960), pp. 28 – 36 and P. Delhaye, “La Vertu et les vices dans les œuvres d’Alain de Lille,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 6 (1963), pp. 13–25.

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morality,60

practical this theorist of penance left no room for liberty of action or freedom of choice.61 Prescriptive in the ethical realm and doctrinaire in the literary sphere, the doctor universalis operated in both as a guardian of the faith. For the role coveted by Alan, the stage had been set by others—notably Peter Lombard, whose Christology had recently come under attack.62 One of the leading Parisian masters who had supported Bernard of Clairaux’s prosecution of Gilbert of Poitiers in 1148, Peter stood at the center of a long controversy, which continued during and after the period in which De planctu Nature was written. The egregious Gerhoch of Reichersberg had denounced what he took to be Peter Lombard’s errors, before being told to hold his peace by Alexander III.63 “Abstain from such public controversies in the future,” ordered the irritated pontiff, “lest the simplices be misled by verborum novitas.”64 Not only Alan’s Natura was suspicious of “profane novelties of speech.” John of Cornwall, in the ﬁrst version of his Eulogium ad Alexandrum papam tertium, composed on the eve of the third Lateran Council in 1179, deplored the polemic among scholars which had dragged on from an earlier generation into his own. This “cancer” that was corrupting the ecclesiastical polity, he argued, should be chopped off with the “sword of excommunication.”65 Harsh critic of the magistri, John impugned their authority with a detailed knowledge of their doctrines that lent weight to his case.66 No less eager to anathematize than Genius, he used similar terms of condemnation—similar, but not as identical to the diction of De planctu 60

See Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants 1, pp. 18ff. Cf. M. Aliotta, La dottrina del peccato nell’ambito della riﬂessione teologica di Alano di Lilla (Palermo, 1986), pp. 59 –141. 62 See J. de Ghellinck, “Pierre Lombard,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 12 (Paris, 1935), 1941–2019, esp. 2003 –11 and J. Châtillon, “Latran III et l’enseignement christologique de Pierre Lombard,” in Le Troisième Concile de Latran (1179). Sa place dans l’histoire, ed. J. Longère (Paris, 1982), pp. 75 – 90. 63 Châtillon, “Latran III,” pp. 79ff. 64 “Nos enim venerabili fratri nostro Salzburgensi archiepiscopo dedimus in mandatis, ut te et illos ab huiusmodi ulterius disputationibus, praesertim in publicis conventibus, abstinere moneat multipliciter et compescat, ne huiusmodi verborum novitate corda rudium et simplicium seducantur, et in erroris (quod absit!) semitam incidere compellantur.” PL 200, 289. 65 “Quoniam itaque inﬁniti scholares hoc calice debriati et in furorem versi usque in hodiernum diem patientia vestra contumaciter abutuntur, qui nequaquam misericordiae vestrae piam dispensationem laudant, sed impium dogma velut catholicum praedicant; ﬁat tandem illud Prosperi quod in decretis legitur: “In eis,” inquit, “qui diu portati et salubriter obiurgati corrigi noluerint, tanquam putridae corporis partes debent ferro excommunicationis abscidi, ne sicut caro morbis emortua, sed si abscissa non fuerit, salutem reliquae carnis putredinis suae contagione corrumpit; ita isti qui emendari contemnunt, et in suo morbo persistunt, alios exemplo suae perditionis inﬁciant.” PL 199, 1043 – 44. 66 Ibid., 1044ff.; 1050 – 53. 61

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Nature as Alexander III’s prohibition, on 24 December 1164, of omnes tropos et indisciplinatas questiones.67 When Alan of Lille’s vicaria Dei spoke with the voice of authority, her accents were papal. In De planctu Nature, with its emphasis on surveillance, regulation, and censorship, Natura plays a role akin to that of Alexander III, who in 1164 ordered Maurice of Sully to prevent, when necessary by excommunication, the spread of errors associated with his predecessor as bishop of Paris. Even a former magister like Peter Lombard, who had been promoted to the episcopal dignity in the city where Alan of Lille taught,68 might fall under a cloud. And if Lombard’s views narrowly escaped condemnation at the third Lateran council, it was not until the fourth, in 1215, that he was rehabilitated. In the meantime, anxiety at the spread of heretical infection motivated papal instructions to the archbishops of France to keep watch on the doctrines being taught in the schools. It was in this atmosphere that De planctu Nature was written. In 1179 Alexander III established the conditions of teaching, especially theology. In his regulation of the licentia docendi, he prohibited what Alan of Lille called licentia excursandi.69 Alert to the directions in which the wind was blowing, he recurred to them later in that product of his stay in the Languedoc, during the 1180s and 1190s, De ﬁde catholica contra hereticos.70 For Alan had understood, early and well, that one aspiring to take a leading role on the intellectual stage should make his debut as a hounder of heretics. To become a doctor universalis, it was not enough to be a magister. Writing for a lay patron, William of Montpellier, magister Alanus used the same didactic tone that he had employed in his enchiridion. Diversity meant deviance, alarming because various heresies had now amalgamated into one “general monster.” Against its poison he prescribed a dose of “authentic” (meaning “approved”) rationes derived from the fathers of the church.71 67

Châtillon, “Lateran III,” p. 81. See Colish, Peter Lombard (Leiden, 1994), p. 22. 69 See below, pp. 308ff. 70 PL 210, 305 –430 with C. Vasoli, “Il Contra hereticos di Alano di Lilla,” Bolletino dell’ Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano 79 (1963), pp. 123 –72. 71 “Quamvis ﬁdes catholica non solum divinarum rationum, verum etiam humanarum fundamentis innixa praefulgeat et auctoritatibus theologicis velut irrefragabilibus maximis invicta consistat, tamen propter novos haereticos novis, imo veteribus et novissimis haeresibus debacchantes, philosophicis speculationibus deditos, sed sensuum speculis destinatos; cogor disertis rationibus de ﬁde rationabili reddere rationem, qui in hoc ab antiquis haereticis differunt, quod illi humanis rationibus ﬁdem nostram expugnare conati sunt; isti vero nulla ratione humana vel divina freti, ad voluntatem et voluptatem suam, monstruosa conﬁngunt. Olim vero diversi haeretici diversis temporibus, diversa dogmata et adversa somniasse leguntur, quae generalis ecclesiae publicis edictis damnata noscuntur: nostris vero temporibus, novi haeretici, imo veteres et inveterati, veterantes dogmata, ex diversis haeresibus, unam generalem haeresim compingunt, et quasi ex diversis idolis unum idolum, ex diversis monstris 68

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Much cited from this work, as if it were a manifesto of relativism, is Alan’s likeness of authority to a waxen nose, because it can be bent in different directions. That is neither what he says nor what he means. The use of authority, as he conceives it, should not be inﬁnitely ﬂexible and needs to be buttressed by reason.72 Rational authority is applied, in De ﬁde catholica, to a disputatio or debate with its author’s heretical opponents. The assumption that they were capable of understanding his arguments and therefore possessed a measure of rationality does not temper Alan’s disdain for the ignorance of the Waldensians. Without episcopal approval or a training in letters, these “philosophers without ratio and prophets without vision” dared to preach. They ventured into territory from which even Cistercian monks versed in scripture steered clear.73 Citing the sentence of excommunication delivered by Pope Lucius III in 1184,74 Alan of Lille also voiced a personal anathema against idiotae who usurped the role of the scholar. Only a learned cleric was capable of analyzing the language appropriate to the doctrine of transubstantiation;75 only one of its erudite guardians could deﬁne an article of the faith.76 “Publicly” diffusing their perverse doctrines, the Waldensian heretics violated the limits of approved enquiry. The boundaries of investigation particular to each discipline, the proprietas of diction suitable to theological subjects, the conﬁnes of the clergy into which the laity should not stray—all central themes of De planctu Naturae, Summa “Quoniam homines,” and the Distinctiones—were transgressed by these miscreants whom he likens to strumpets and concubines.77 Plurality of interpretation, for Alan of Lille, is not the ambivalent hydra of Bernardus Silvestris.78 When Alan uses that metaphor, he means a monster, literally to be destroyed. Unequivocal in his assertion of the sacerdotal power to bind and to loose,79 the doctor universalis lays down orthodoxy’s universal laws.

unum monstrum; et quasi ex diversis venenatis herbis unum toxicum commune conﬁciunt. Sed quia antiqua sunt dogmata, non novis elaborandum est inventis, sed rationibus obviandum authenticis, quae impia dogmata e praeclari ingenii viris et in omni disciplina exercitatis deleta fuisse traduntur, ut ab Augustino, Hilario, Hieronymo, et caeteris patribus orthodoxis.” PL 210, 307– 8. 72 “Sed quia auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diversum potest ﬂecti sensum, rationibus roborandum est.” Ibid., 333. See further below, p. 346. 73 Ibid., 377–80. 74 Ibid., 382. 75 Ibid., 360 –62. 76 Ibid., 363. 77 Ibid., 395. 78 Ibid., 307, and see above, p. 239. 79 See L. Hödl, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Literatur und der Theologie der Schlüsselgewalt 1, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Theologie des Mittelalters 38, 4 (Münster, 1960), pp. 236ff. See further below, p. 334.

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The universality of Alan’s claims, combined with his stress on the distinctness of the disciplines—ordered and connected with one another, yet subordinate to theology—display a striking consistency from his ﬁrst to last works. The methodology developed by Gilbert of Poitiers, like the ideal of concordantia artium embraced by Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches, and to which Alan of Lille was indebted, had been formulated in a context where scholarship was vulnerable. Heresy, most damning and least precise of liable charges against an intellectual, resembled a hydra prone to ensnare him in its coils. Withdrawing into the citadel of polymathy, he sought to occupy a position above the vulgar mêlée. Comprehensive in his claims yet speciﬁc in his techniques, he then had the defense of propriety and exclusiveness. But he had still to be careful about what he said and how he said it. That is why Alan of Lille struggled with the problem of expression and content. If he did not share Bernardus Silvestris’s reluctance to speak about the summum bonum, he viewed the ornatus of “rhetorical colors” with a similar skepticism. Yet how did one avoid employing them, if one aimed to approximate to the highest level occupied by intelligentia in the hierarchy of learning? Elevated style was not enough. The time had passed, in Medieval Latin literature, when decorative description, as practiced by the “Loire-poets”—Hildebert, Marbod, and Baudri—could be regarded as an end in itself. After the Mathematicus and the Cosmographia, there was no going back. But it was unclear how one should go forward, when Bernardus’s rigorous subordination of form to content, which placed a premium on what might be left unsaid, entailed a renunciation that was intolerable. Hence Alan of Lille’s quandary, dramatized at epic length when he wrote the Anticlaudianus. There, in his remorseless drive to deﬁnition, the implicit had to be spelled out. All that was potential in the tradition before Alan is stated explicitly in the prologue to this work—described as an opus consummatum, omnium artium . . . imago,80 in terms indebted to the two Bernards81 —with, however, a difference. Ad intuitum supercelestium formarum, the activity proper to intelligentia, was the standard by which Bernardus Silvestris had 80 “Quoniam igitur in hoc opere resultat grammatice syntaseos regula, dialectice lexeos maxima, oratorie reseos communis sententia, arismetice matheseos paradoxa, musice melos, anxioma geometrie, gramatis theorema, astronomice ebdomadis excellentia, theophanie celestis emblema . . .” Ed. R. Bossuat (Paris, 1958), p. 56. 81 “hii, qui sue rationis materiale in turpibus imaginibus non permittunt quiescere, sed ad intuitum supercelestium formarum audent attollere, mei operis ingrediantur angustias, certa discretionis libra pensantes quid sit dignum in aures publicas promulgari uel silentio penitus sepeliri.” Ibid. For the similarities between this prologue and the preface to Alan’s Regulae caelestis iuris, see M.-T. D’Alverny, “Alain de Lille et la Theologia,” in L’Homme devant Dieu. Mélanges offerts au Père H. de Lubac 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 117.

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measured his writings, only to concede that they fell short of reaching this sublime goal. No victim of false modesty, Alan does not hesitate to arrogate to the Anticlaudianus what his unadmitted precursor had humbly disclaimed. Of a piece with this bombast is the allusion to Bernard of Chartres’ aphorism about dwarves on the shoulders of giants.82 Stripped of its ambiguity, it reveals Alan’s naked ambition to write posteris imitandus. As to the levels of learning and interpretation that his work is capable of addressing, its author is in no doubt. It embraces them all,83 which by no means entailed general accessibility. To this self-proclaimed Gesamtkunstwerk only the initiate were to be admitted.84 The exclusive qualities of integumental method are concentrated in its lofty mysteries; and the profane, likened to dogs and to swine, are refused entry, ne derogetur secretis. These overweening pretensions have been accepted on their own terms,85 ignoring both the setting and scope of Alan of Lille’s work and his deafening tone of triumph. The prologue to the Anticlaudianus is presented as a solution to every uncertainty, as an answer to each question, that had been raised about the allied subjects of poetry and hermeneutics in the second and third quarters of the twelfth century. Its proof is the text that it introduces. Here, the author declares, is a complete embodiment of the concordantia artium, a consummate expression of harmony between the artes and intelligentia. To Alan’s forerunners, a single, grudging, and anonymous allusion. Attention is concentrated on his rivals—contemporaries described as “Ennius” and “Mevius,” distinguished by plebeian taste and presumption (I,165ff.).86 Voluble in his animus, Alan of Lille is tacit 82 “Cum pigmea humilitas excessui superposita giganteo, altitudine gigantem preueniat et riuus a fonte scaturiens in torrentem multiplicatus excrescat.” Bossuat, ed., p. 56. 83 “Hoc igitur opus fastidire non audeant, qui adhuc nutricum uagientes in cunis inferioris discipline lactantur uberibus. Huic operi derogare non temptent, qui altioris scientiae militiam spondent. Huic operi abrogare non presumant, qui celum philosophie uertice pulsant. In hoc etenim opere litteralis sensus suauitas puerilem demulcebit auditum, moralis instructio perﬁcientem imbuet sensum, acutior allegorie subtilitas proﬁcientem acuet intellectum.” Ibid. 84 “Ab huius igitur operis arceantur ingressu qui, solam sensualitatis insequentes imaginem, rationis non appetunt ueritatem, ne sanctum canibus prostitutum sordescat, ne porcorum pedibus conculcata margarita depereat, ne derogetur secretis, si eorum magestas diuulgetur indignis.” Ibid. Best, on the integumental background, is C. Maier [-Staubach]’s review-essay of P. Ochsenbein, Studien zum Anticlaudianus des Alanus ab Insulis (Frankfurt, 1975): “Zum Problem der allegorischen Interpretation mittelalterlicher Dichtung. Über ein neues Buch zum Anticlaudianus des Alan von Lille,” Beiträge zur Gechichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 99 (1977), pp. 250 – 96, esp. 255ff. 85 “Students could learn moral lessons while refreshing their knowledge of grammar and the artes.” Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar, p. 101. 86 Cf. N. Adkin, “Alan of Lille on Walter of Châtillon: Anticlaudianus 1, 167–70,” Classica et Mediaevalia 43 (1992), pp. 287– 315.

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about his debts. Yet without the achievement of Bernard of Chartres and Bernardus Silvestris, neither of whom he mentions by name, the grandiose ambitions of this prologue could scarcely have been voiced. The arena cleared of competitors, the Anticlaudianus plays for higher stakes. That the game was well received by a large audience, the success of Alan’s poem attests.87 Ascribed to its marriage of style to sense in an inﬂuential study by J. Huizinga, the work’s achievement has been summed up by him in the following terms: Yet its most signiﬁcant feature lies in detail. This becomes clear if one pays attention rather to the poetic language that Alan employs to voice his fundamental ideas than to his manner of representation. In this veil of vividness, a serious intellect struggles with his deepest urge: to lend expression to the central truth, as he sees it; and he resorts to images when concepts fail him.88

The interest in ﬁne art and in visual evidence, so distinctive in Huizinga’s approach, informs these sentences, written eight years after he had published The Waning of the Middle Ages.89 What seemed to him the hollow symbolism, the sterility of late medieval culture, led Huizinga back in time to search for unity of form and meaning in the prägotischer Geist.90 The “ludic element,” from which the famous book that he was to bring out seven years later takes its title,91 ﬁnds a preview in this account of Alan of Lille; and the language in which it characterizes the Anticlaudianus reveals much about Huizinga’s criteria and values. The poem is, for him, a “work of colorful and rhetorical imagery” in contrast to the “conceptual rigidity” of contemporary theology.92 Resis87 See C. Meier [-Staubach], “Die Rezeption des Anticlaudianus Alans von Lille in Textkommentierung und Illustration,” in Text und Bild, ed. C. Meier and U. Ruberg (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 408–549 and C. Huber, Die Aufnahme und Verarbeitung des Alanus ab Insulis in der mittelhochdeutschen Dichtung (Zürich, 1988). 88 “Das Wichtigste jedoch steckt bei ihm im Detail. Es enthüllt sich, wenn man nicht so sehr auf die Darstellung als solche als auf den dichterischen Sprachgebrauch achtgibt, dessen Alanus sich bedient, um seinen Grundgedanken auszudrücken. In dieser bunten Hülle ringt ein ernster Geist mit seinem tiefsten Bedürfnis: der zentralen Wahrheit, wie er sie schaut, Ausdruck zu verleihen; und er greift zum Bilde, wo der Begriff versagt.” “Über die Verknüpfung des Poetischen mit dem Theologischen bei Alanus de Insulis,” Mededeelingen der koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde 74, B.N.o 6 (Amsterdam, 1932), p. 38. 89 See B. Kempers, “Der verleiding van het beeld. Het visuele als blijvende bron van inspiratie in het werk van Huizinga,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiednis 105 (1992), pp. 30 – 50 and F. Haskell, “Huizinga and the Flemish Renaissance,” in id., History and Its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993), pp. 433 – 95. 90 Cf. von Moos, Geschichte als Topik, pp. 276ff. 91 Homo Ludens. Versuch einer Bestimmung des Spielelements der Kultur (Amsterdam, 1939). 92 “buntes und rhetorisches Bildwerk” and “begrifﬂiche Starrheit”; “Über die Verknüpfung,” p. 65.

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tance to a developing scholasticism, the dessicating consequences of which Huizinga believed he had observed in the late Middle Ages, is what he prized in Alan of Lille. Huizinga disliked drabness; hence his emphasis on color, repeated in the following sentences: “Distinctive of Alan is the colorful depiction of the theme. In this use of poetic language itself are to be found some of the best things that he had to say.”93 Such is Huizinga’s thesis, stated with grace and motivated by yearning for the spontaneity of a “pre-Gothic” age. It is attractive; it deals more directly than any later study with a central issue raised by the Anticlaudianus; and it is the product of wishful thinking. When, more than a decade before the composition of his epic, Natura, in Alan’s De planctu Nature, attempted to evolve a theory of stylistic congruence, her difﬁculty lay with the transcendent. Her answer to the problem of how to deﬁne the indeﬁnable was formulated in a verse catalogue of contrarieties94 that invites comparison with the pivotal moment, at Anticlaudianus 5, 114ff., when the puella poli, before whose authority the artes have yielded place, is confronted with the celestial mysteries that defy their expressive powers: Here the mysteries of God, the hidden depths of the divine mind, have been traced by a ﬁne needle, with form lending shape to the formless, place to the inﬁnite, direction to the hidden. It sets bounds to the limitless, brings the invisible to view: what the tongue cannot express is declared by the picture.95

This is what Huizinga meant when he referred to Alan’s Bildwerk, but he was prudent to qualify that noun by the adjective rhetorical; for God, in the verbose vision of the Anticlaudianus, is portrayed as a rhetorician: As God Himself contains within Himself all names of things that are not alien to the divine nature, He conceives of everything by means of a trope and, by composing a ﬁgure, adopts pure names without objects. He is the just being without justice, the living one without life, 93 “Die bunte Ausmalung des Themas gehört Alanus. In diesem dichterischen Sprachgebrauch selbst liegt mit etwas vom Besten, das er zu sagen hatte.” Ibid. 94 See above, p. 297. 95 “Hic archana Dei, diuine mentis abyssum / Subtilis describit acus formaque ﬁgurat / Informem, locat immensum monstratque latentem. / Incirconscriptum describit, uisibus offert / Inuisum: quod lingua nequit pictura fatetur.”

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beginning without beginning, end without end, immense without measure, strong without force. . . .96

Supplanting his mute mediatrix, Alan then assumes the role of the prophet and reaches the presence of the Virgin Mary, where . . . nature is silent, the verbal arts powerless, rhetoric’s sway entirely destroyed and reason’s hold shaken.97

Confronted with the ineffable, Alan appeals to the rhetorice . . . arbitrium he has just repudiated. There follow no less than sixty-three verses, endlessly explicating the inexplicable. Despite the many debts of the Anticlaudianus to the Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s “negative theology” of ekphrasis marks a clear break with the aims and methods of Bernardus Silvestris. Ambiguity is abandoned, evocation relinquished in favor of an explicitness that depends on the verbal arts their skeptic professes to devalue. Declarations of the insufﬁciency of his medium to his message are blatantly belied by his practice, and the images in which Huizinga wished to identify Alan’s achievement are submerged in torrents of paradox. To imagine this poet reaching the limits of expression and advancing beyond the model of Bernardus Silvestris is a beguiling thought98 but one that, in its twelfth-century context, is simply not true. Alan of Lille, theological exponent of an axiomatic method indebted to logica,99 imports into poetry those techniques of deﬁnition and counter-definition from which Bernardus Silvestris had strived to protect it. Less an Anticlaudianus, therefore, than an Antibernardus. The opponent of scholasticism whom Huizinga wished to see in the author of this poem is not a plausible ﬁgure. Avid to specify, to particularize, to assimi96 “Qualiter ipse Deus in se capit omnia rerum / Nomina, que non ipsa Dei natura recusat, / Cuncta tamen, mediante tropo, dictante ﬁgura / Concipit et uoces puras sine rebus adoptat. / Ens iustus sine iusticia, uiuens sine uita, / Principium sine principio, ﬁnis sine ﬁne, / Immensus sine mensura, sine robore fortis. . . .” Anticlaudianus, 5, 124ff. 97 “. . . natura silet, logice uis exulat, omnis / Rhetorice perit arbitrium racioque uacillat.” Ibid., 5, 478–79. 98 Huizinga, “Über die Verknüpfung,” pp. 65 and 119. This theme has been pursued by C. Méla, “Poetria Nova et Novus Homo,” and by P. Galand, “Les Beaux Signes. Un locus amoenus d’Alain de Lille,” in Littérature (May, 1989). Le Miroir et la lettre. Écrire au Moyen Age, pp. 20ff., 27ff. 99 Cf. A. de Libéra, “Logique et théologique dans la Summa ‘Quoniam Hominis’ d’Alain de Lille,” in Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains. Aux origines de la Logica Modernorum, ed. J. Jolivet (Naples, 1987), pp. 437– 69. Alan of Lille is not mentioned in J. Ziolkowski, “The Humor of Logic and the Logic of Humor in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993), pp. 1–26, perhaps because the humor of the Anticlaudianus is inadvertent.

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late poetry to the analytic procedures that linked theology with logic and dialectic, Alan sacriﬁced to this urge all that had established the distinctiveness of his medium in the tradition on which he drew. This accounts for the popularity of the Anticlaudianus among medieval schoolmasters and their modern counterparts. More “encyclopedic” than the Cosmographia and less difﬁcult, it spells out, on every subject from the order of learning to the attributes of the ideal man, what its readers should think. Small wonder, then, that the novelty of the “program” announced in the prologue to the Anticlaudianus has been accepted at face value. No one before Alan of Lille had itemised its elements so thoroughly. But there was a price to pay for his scholastic exhaustiveness—a loss of subtlety, a penchant for paradox that hovers constantly on the brink of bathos, a discord between expression and content that frequently lapses into selfcontradiction. Judged in terms of the works of the “encyclopaedic” authors which preceded it, the Anticlaudianus does indeed represent a novelty— and a regress. That, understandably, is not quite how Alan of Lille himself viewed his poem. He decries, in his prose prologue, the modernorum ruditas. There, and in the verse that follows, delectatio novitatis is linked to tenuitas—an attribute later praised in those virtuosos of poetical rhetoric, Symmachus and Sidonius, masters of all the styles (3, 240–47). To rhetoric is ascribed a quality, conventional in itself but strikingly absent from the prolix poetry of the Anticlaudianus. Brevity, expressive of modus or moderantia,100 is the virtue that John of Salisbury, at Metalogicon 1, 24, deﬁnes as characteristic of the stylistic theory developed by Bernard of Chartres. The same criterion of moderantia shapes Alan’s account of Prudentia’s appearance at 1, 270ff.—a passage modeled on Matthew of Vendôme’s description of Helena at Ars versiﬁcatoria 1, 56—and informs the list of Modestia’s gifts at 7, 135ff.101 Expounding there, as elsewhere, the doctrine of ne quid nimis, Alan of Lille proceeds to undermine it by the immoderate mannerism of his style. This conﬂict between an inherited ideal of hermetic restraint and the lust for clarity—equated with length, repetition, and explication—is displayed 100 “Succincte docet illa loqui sensusque profundos / Sub sermone breui concludere, claudere multa / Sub paucis nec diffuso sermone uagari, / Ut breue sit uerbum, diues sentencia, sermo / Facundus, multi fecundus pondere sensus” (7, 276 – 80). 101 Vel nimis in faciem terre demissus, inhertem / Desertumque notet animum; moderancius ergo / Erigitur, nec enim surgit uel decidit ultra / Mensuram. Signans mentem, Constancia uultus / Scurriles prohibet gestus nimiumque seueros / Abdicat incessus, ne uel lasciuia scurram / Predicet, aut fastus nimius rigor exprimat usum. . . . / Ne cultu nimium crinis lasciuus adequet / Femineos luxus sexusque recidat honorem, / Aut nimis incomptus iaceat, scalore profundo / Degener et iuuenem proprii neglectus honoris / Philosophum nimis esse probet, tenet inter utrumque / Illa modum proprioque locat de more capillos. / Non habitum cultus nimio splendore serenat, / Non scalore premit, mediocriter omnia pensat.”

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in Alan’s portrayal of Aristotle, the leading representative of the discipline with which he aimed to combine poetry (1,131ff.). Logica is a weapon in the battle against sophistry, obscurity, and falsehood (3, 33ff.; cf. 7, 261ff.), but when the author of the Sophistici Elenchi (already an ambivalent ﬁgure in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis 102) makes his entry later in the third book (vv. 115–28), clarity is not his most prominent virtue: Aristotle, disturber of linguistic peace, appears, troubling many by his turbulence and delighting in his obscurity. 117 He treats logic in such a way that he seems not to have treated it— not because he makes errors, but because he shrouds everything in a veil of words that close attention can scarcely unravel. Yet he deliberately dresses his sayings in such darkness, to avoid prostituting his secrets and yielding up his mysteries or debasing them. For the majesty of a secret is devalued and loses all its splendor if it becomes public. He who popularizes mysterious utterances commits lèse-majesté, and secrets no longer exist when the masses know them, for common knowledge always creates tedium, and publicity produces revulsion or contempt.103

At one level, it is the difﬁculty of the “new” Aristotelian logic that is emphasized. At another, it is difﬁcult to construe v. 117 as encomium. Aristotle’s writings, by a typical paradox, are evoked in terms that lend them an uncanny resemblance to Plato’s archana rerum celique profunda described by Alan earlier (I,132–34). Those terms, reminiscent of the theory of sacrilege as treason, owe a debt to the language of integumentum (velamina verbi, velat, vestit, latebras, secreta, arcanum, mistica). They are applied, in the preface to Alan’s Quoniam homines and in his Regulae theologicae, to the higher discourse of theological intelligentia. Here they are meant negatively. Zeno, who follows 102 I,59ff., on which see Dionisotti, “Walter of Châtillon and the Greeks,” in Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition, Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. P. Godman and O. Murray, p. 89, where the banality of Aristotle’s advice to Alexander is not mentioned. “Already” in the sentence above implies acceptance of Dionisotti’s dating of the Alexandreis (largely complete before 1176 and probably published in that year, p. 96). 103 “Verborum turbator adest et turbine multos / Turbat Aristotiles noster gaudetque latere. / Sic logicam tractat, quod non tractasse uidetur, / [117] Non quod oberret in hac, set quod velamine uerbi / Omnia sic velat, quod vix labor ista reuelet. / Qui tamen iccirco uestit sua dicta latebris, / Ne sua prostituat secreta, suumque relinquens / Archanum, uulgo tandem uilescere cogat, / Nam sua secreti maiestas uilet et omni / Priuatur splendore sui, si publica ﬁat; / Nam magestatem minuit qui mistica uulgat, / Nec secreta manent quorum ﬁt conscia turba, / Nam res uulgate semper fastidia gignunt: / Ex re uulgata contemptus nausea surgit.”

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Aristotle, is lauded not as a turbator verborum but as a systematizer who in normam scema reducit. Lucidity is the standard; the imagery that of light as opposed to darkness: nudat latebras, in lucem tenebrosa refert (3,131f.). Boethius exerit ambiguum (ibid. 134). Ambiguous only when masking reservation as praise, the Anticlaudianus dresses Aristotle in the garb of hermetic obscurity that its author wished to discard. A new type of balance, allegedly lacking in Aristotle, is being urged. Is this what Alan of Lille means when he criticizes, in his prose prologue, the “roughness of the moderns” (modernorum ruditas) and deﬁnes its opposite as tenuis? Hardly. His own poetic style is not tenuis, in the sense of brief, succinct, or limpid. All these criteria had been raised, however, in that manifesto of “modernism” issued by Matthew of Vendôme, an author with whom Alan displays close afﬁnities: For ancient authors, it was essential to expand their subject-matter with minor digressions and epigrams tangentially related to their topic, in order that the poverty of their material might be padded out with poetic fantasies and swell into an artiﬁcial luxuriance. But for modern writers, this is prohibited. Overtaken by modernity, old practices have fallen by the wayside.104

And each of these standards is related, in the Ars versiﬁcatoria, to the doctrine of moderantia, the theory of ne quid nimis,105 to which Alan pays lip service. We are considering the literature of the ﬁnal quarter of the twelfth century—the period in which Peter of Blois also ﬂourished. From it we possess lyric verse of a reﬁnement incomparable to anything in previous Medieval Latin poetry. Its claims to the qualities of “modernism” so stridently proclaimed by Matthew of Vendôme are never stated explicitly. They are voiced implicitly, in tactful illustration of the same ideal: A tenello tenera pectusculo distenduntur latera pro modulo. Caro carens scrupulo levem tactum non offendit; 104 “Antiquis siquidem incumbebat materiam protelare quibusdam diverticulis et collateralibus sententiis, ut materiae penuria poetico ﬁgmento plenius exuberans in artiﬁciosum luxuriaret incrementum. Hoc autem modernis non licet. Vetera enim cessavere novis supervenientibus.” Ars versiﬁcatoria 4, 5, ed. F. Munari, Mathei Vindocinensis opera 2, Storia e letteratura. Raccolta di studi e testi 171 (Rome, 1988), p. 195. 105 See F. Quadlbauer, Die antike Theorie der Genera Dicendi, pp. 74ff. On Matthew’s pedantry see id., “Ovidkritik bei Matthaeus von Vendôme und ihre poetologisch-rhetorischen Hintergründe,” in Kontinuität und Wandel. Lateinische Poesie von Naevius bis Baudelaire. F. Munari zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. U. Stache (Hildesheim, 1986), pp. 424 – 43.

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gracilis sub cingulo umbilicum preextendit paululum ventriculo tumescentiore.106

So the ﬁfth strophe of one of Peter’s lyrics on the idealized nude,107 exemplifying, in its delicate symmetries and playful paronomasia, the theme of restraint. Pro modulo: the proportions are miniature; the brush strokes spare. Observe, for instance, the verbal counterpoint between the diminuitive ventriculo and the comparative tumescentiore—untranslatable with the same compression. This is the doctrine of ne quid nimis condensed into verses of elegant economy and ironized by a contrast of grammar and sense. Writing of such sophistication and quality is attested seldom even in the ﬁnal quarter of the twelfth century, rarely before, and never in the Anticlaudianus. The Latin term for its “Alexandrian” idiom is tenuis. Demanding a combination of virtuosity and control, it aimed to achieve an effect of moderantia foreign to Alan of Lille. No matter that Peter practiced a genre different from Alan’s and wrote rhythmical, not quantitative, verse. We know what the poetry of the twelfth-century moderni looked like. It did not look like the Anticlaudianus. And that had consequences not only for the style but also for the contents and audience of this epic, because moderantia or modus or “the mean” was a subject of heated discussion in the circles to which the poem sought to appeal, under the inﬂuence of the Aristotle whom it presents so ambiguously.108 It has become customary to describe the Anticlaudianus as a Bildungsepos. Its author set out to show that, as his epitaph proclaims, omne scibile scivit. Alan of Lille’s learning is not in question. At issue is his judgment, artistic and intellectual, and (a graver charge) his sense of humor, conspicuous by its absence in this golden age of wits. In the twenty years that remained to him after the composition of the Anticlaudianus, Alan never again attempted a Bildungsepos. The usual inference is that the success of this poem made repetition superﬂuous. Repetition was the least of Alan’s 106 “From her soft little bosom / her slim sides taper down / in delicate proportions; / their ﬂawless ﬂesh / yielding / to the gentle caress. / Slender beneath the waistline / her navel stretches out / on a tiny belly swelling forth / to just the slightest degree.” 107 Text and analysis in Godman, “Literary Classicism and Latin Erotic Poetry of the Twelfth Century and the Renaissance,” in Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition, pp. 153ff. Cf. Carmen Buranum 67, 4a, where Bernardus Silvestris’s inﬂuence on Peter of Blois is manifest. 108 C. J. Nederman, “The Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean and John of Salisbury’s Concept of Liberty,” Vivarium 24 (1986), pp. 128 – 42; id., “Aristotelian Ethics and John of Salisbury’s Letters,” Viator 18 (1987), pp. 161–73 and id., “Knowledge, Virtue and the Path to Wisdom: The Unacknowledged Aristotelianism of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon,” MS 51 (1989), pp. 268– 86. See further below.

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concerns; his sensitivity to it was minimal; but he had reason to be perturbed by a response to his work that was far from ﬂattering. That response came immediately, in the early 1180s, from Alan’s most discerning reader and most devastating critic, John of Hauvilla. An ideal man who is no hero, an allegory that lacks coherence, a story that scarcely exists:109 such was the legacy that the modern master of the Bildungsepos bequeathed to John of Hauvilla with a fanfare of self-applause. To this challenge John rose with a parody, directed at both of Alan’s major works,110 but particularly at his interminable epic. How, is difﬁcult to deﬁne, because neither the genre nor the comedy of the Architrenius has been analyzed. Its editor characterizes it as “a satirical and didactic narrative poem”;111 others regard it as a moralistic or psychological allegory.112 The work describes the wanderings of Architrenius, his sorrow at his sinfulness and at the imperfection of humanity, his search for Natura, wisdom, and consolation113 —a conﬂation, in short, of the themes of De planctu Nature and Anticlaudianus, transposed onto a different plane. Architrenius does not journey through the empyrean but meanders on the face of the earth. In his quest for enlightenment, he is confronted with a vast range of experiences—classical, contemporary, legendary—and with the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Architrenius, true to etymological principles, responds by dissolving in tears. The opposite of Alan’s ideal man formed by the seven liberal arts, courtly virtue, and revelation, he is not a hero of renascent culture but an antihero of Unbildung. What Architrenius learns is nothing. This is made manifest from the outset of the poem, which one of John’s early readers misinterpreted as a “secret” variant on the theme of omnia vincit labor et ingenium.114 Among the allusions at Architrenius I,1ff. ﬁgure Xerxes’ canal through Athos, his bridge of boats across the Hellespont, and Daedalus’s wings. Examples of fervid but fatal labor and of misdirected ingenium, they give plain notice of what is to follow: an epic account of striving less by a vir perfectus modeled on the works of Virgil and Statius 109 See M.-R. Jung, Études sur le poème allégorique en France au Moyen Age (Berne, 1971), pp. 64 –88, and C. Huber, “Die personiﬁzierte Natur. Gestalt und Bedeutung im Umkreis des Alanus ab Insulis und seiner Rezeption,” in Bildhafte Rede im Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. W. Harms (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 159 – 65. 110 John’s debts to and differences from De planctu Nature and Anticlaudianus are discussed by P. G. Schmidt, ed., Johannes de Hauvilla Architrenius (Munich, 1974), pp. 80– 86. 111 Ibid., p. 9. 112 Jung, Études, pp. 120–21 and P. Piehler, The Visionary Landscape. A Study in Medieval Allegory (London, 1971), pp. 85 – 94. Cf. W. Wetherbee, trans. and ed., Johannes de Hauvilla Architrenius (Cambridge, 1994), pp. xi ff. 113 For a full summary of the “plot,” see Schmidt, ed., pp. 30ff. 114 Ibid., pp. 127, 286.

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than by a mindless mourner, surveyed with the caustic gaze of a Juvenal or an Ovid. Architrenius is a vir perfectus in reverse. Indeed he is not even a man but a puer of lacrimose stupidity which, at every one of the many opportunities provided, he displays ad nauseam. That limit is reached in the seventh book, when the sage Thales, in a movement of impatience shared by the reader, urges this mental midget to stop sniveling: “Cease crying, my boy, and understand that tears are unbecoming to the cheeks of a man! It is shameful to drench masculine toughness in ﬂoods of this kind. Lacrimose lamentation is a sign of degeneracy: women, prone to weep, have well-watered hearts, and have learned to camouﬂage their wiles and display their grief in tears which fall readily!”115

Why this repeated stress on tears? They stand at the center of the Architrenius and provide a total deﬁnition of its antihero, yet their purpose has not been explained. Among the Christian virtues, sorrow ranked high.116 A “theology of tears”117 had been developed in patristic and medieval tradition, an exaltation of weeping applicable not only to monks.118 In the twelfth-century context of faith and piety in which the Architrenius appeared, there was nothing inherently ridiculous about the sole activity of its principal ﬁgure. His absurdity was produced by its excess. Parallels to the ironical use of “archi-” in pseudonyms such as “Archipoeta” are not needed to see John’s intention; a sense of humor sufﬁces. Architrenius, who signally lacks it, carries everything—even the Christian quality of sorrow—to its ultimate extreme. That is why his marriage to Moderantia, at the end of the work, is a master-stroke of parody (and not, despite the literal-minded, a mystical union of moral attributes). The style, like the proportions, of the poem, is 115 “Parce puer lacrimis, ﬂetus agnosce virilem / Dedecuisse genam! pudor est hoc imbre rigorem / Immaduisse virum; lacrime planctusque loquuntur / Degeneres animos, riguumque facillima ﬂendi / Femina pectus habet didicitque cadentibus ultro / In lacrimis clausisse dolos, reserasse dolores . . .” (vv. 280 – 85). 116 See von Moos, Consolatio. 117 The term is taken from K. Holl, Enthusiasmus und Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mönchtum. Eine Studie zu Symeon dem neuen Theologen (Leipzig, 1898), p. 61. 118 See Constable, Reformation, p. 273 and G. Schmitz, “. . .quod rident homines, plorandum est. Der ‘Unwert’ des Lachens in monastisch geprägten Vorstellungen der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters,” in Stadtverfassungen—Verfassungsstaat—Pressepolitik. Festschrift für E. Naujoks zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. F. Quarthal (Sigmaringen, 1980), pp. 3 – 15 and “Ein Narr, der da lacht . . . Überlegungen zu einer mittelalterlichen Verhaltensnorm,” Vom Lachen. Einem Phänomen auf der Spur, ed. T. Vogel (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 129– 53.

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ornate, obscure, hypertrophiated; yet what it advocates is ne quid nimis— the originally Aristotelian doctrine of the mean so seriously advanced by John of Salisbury and so frivolously undercut by Walter of Châtillon in the Ovidian auctoritas that concludes his mock-argument for cupidity (“be comfortably off, if you can’t be a plutocrat”): inter utrumque tene: medio tutissimus ibis.119

We have entered the inverted world of the late-twelfth-century parodists, than whom no Medieval Latin author was more subversive. We meet John of Hauvilla, than whom none was more ingenious. His subject is not human perfectibility but human imperfection; neither wisdom nor understanding on a heroic scale but stupidity of monumental dimensions. John’s alignment is with Walter of Châtillon and Nigel of Canterbury, author of the diverting Speculum stultorum,120 against the solemn Alan of Lille and his unpersuasive insistence on moderantia. In order to marry her personiﬁcation and to procreate, as Natura advises Architrenius to do at the commonsensical conclusion of John’s poem, neither a comprehensive culture nor a knowledge of Aristotelian ethics and their medieval adaptations was required.121 The point of the counsel lies in its platitudinousness, matching the antihero’s abysmal level of intelligence. The doctrine of the mean becomes the banality of the mundane, its simplicity of content at variance with the complexity of its form and expression; and the vir perfectus, reformed by the gifts of learning in the Anticlaudianus, gives way to the perfect idiot, incapable of proﬁting from them, in the Architrenius. Its parody is all the more telling for being directed not only at the substance but also at the style of the Anticlaudianus. John saw clearly the discrepancy between Alan’s profession of restraint and practice of excess. A striking example of his insight is provided by the descriptio pulchritudinis continued from the end of the ﬁrst book at the beginning of Book 2 of the Architrenius: 119 Carm. 6,20,4, ed. K. Strecker, Die moralisch-satirischen Gedichte Walters von Châtillon (Heidelberg, 1929), p. 87. The quotation is from Metamorphoses 2.140. For context see J. Mann, “Satiric Subject and Satiric Object,” and P. G. Schmidt, “The Quotation in Goliardic Poetry,” in Latin Poetry iin the Classical Tradition, ed. Godman and Murray, pp. 39 – 56. 120 Cf. F. P. Knapp, “Antworte dem Narren nach seiner Narrheit! Das ‘Speculum Stultorum’ des Nigellus von Canterbury Reinardus,” Yearbook of the International Reynard Society 3 (1990), pp. 45– 68. 121 Pace W. Hermanns, Über den Begriff der Mässigung, Diss. phil. (Aachen, 1913), p. 49: “Hier erscheint also das Masshalten als der Weisheit letzter Schluss. Bedeutsamer hätte der Stagarite selbst nicht auf den Wert der rechten Mitte hinweisen können [sic].”

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She is taller than the short, shorter than the tall, avoiding, by the middle way of her charming stature, any excess of height and diminutiveness. Natura paid attention to the mean, as she labored hard and attentively at this masterpiece, so that nothing should be missing. So that the model should guide her creative hands, she had ﬁrst drafted a design of a girl with carefully chosen proportions, who was not to squat like a dwarf or tower like a titan. Her little breasts, styled with restraint, brevity, and polish, do not hang, full and loose, like those of a crone. Flat during her childhood, they then begin to bud with the roundness of a tender plant. Remaining closed while there is not yet a baby weeping for milk, they resemble ivory surrounding a ﬁrm knot. A valley, ploughing its level furrow, separates both the little apples of her breasts, in free fall until a deft feel for space uplifts a small stomach and her womb smoothly rises in a short, swelling ark to meet it. Where her rounded girdle draws its tight hold about her middle, her thighs narrow the distance between her supple loins—fuller in the breasts, slimmer in the groins— up to the coils of her kidneys that ﬁll out as her genitals grow. A place inaccessible to Venus, who has been shut out, a secret garden matures with delicate ﬂowers of Modesty. There, unharmed by adulthood and a prey still intact, Modesty reigns alone in an empty court, its bedchambers unavailable to guests. The ﬂame of youth holds its harmless sparks in control, nor does Venus interpose the ﬁre that wakes the itch of desire, nor does love follow a byway to Modesty’s unwelcoming inn— no harm is done by the mother with her torch and the son with his bow. Wicked and arrogant vice cannot open those doors closed with Virtue’s key, bolted with steel, and sealed with a vow of unbreakable solemnity. Seated outside is down, soft and ﬂeecy in early youth, which does not creep in quantities over the threshold but plays about the outer margins, an early version of ﬁne moss.122

122 “Est brevibus maior, magnis minor: omne recidit (10) / Stature vicium medio statura venustas. / Consuluit Natura modum, cum sedula tantum / Desudaret opus, ne qua delinqueret; utque / Artiﬁcis digitos exemplar duceret, ante / Pinxerat electi spacii mensura puellam, (15) / Ne male Pygmea sedeat, Titania surgat. / Circumcisa, brevis, limata mamillula laxum / Non implet longeva sinum, puerilibus annis / Castigata sedet, teneroque rotundula botro / Pullulat et nondum lacrimante puerpera lacte (20) / Clauditur et solidum succingit eburnea nodum. / Bina mamillarum distinguit pomula planum / Vallis arans sulcum, descensu libera, donec / Ventriculum tollat spacii cautela, brevemque / Obvius enodis uteri

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Alan, it will be recalled, had adapted Matthew of Vendôme’s descriptio Helenae in his account of Prudentia’s appearance at Anticlaudianus I, 270ff.123 His message, belied by his medium, was, as usual, moderantia— here echoed by John of Hauvilla, in the catalogue of distinctions without a difference at vv. 10 –16. The exhaustiveness of his model is parodied through a concentration on the erogenous zones by which Alan had prudishly passed; and this passage ﬁnds one of its climaxes in the area where no climax had taken place (vv. 30–34). A development from the halfhumorous description of the male genitalia in the Cosmographia (Microcosmus, 14, 153–166), this, the ﬁrst depiction of the female pudenda and pubic hair in the Latin epic of the Middle Ages, exposes the comedy of the descriptio pulchritudinis employed by the Anticlaudianus. John’s ornatus difﬁcilis mirrors the disharmony of expression and content in Alan’s poem, magnifying its mannerisms into a bloated baroque. Against whose style and themes this work was written, is evident. For whom, and to which purpose, is less obvious. The Anticlaudianus has been considered a speculum principis composed for Philip Augustus,124 and it is therefore pertinent to ask why John’s epic on stupidity sets out to dismantle Alan’s prototype so cleverly. The answer lies in the dedication. The Architrenius is inscribed to Walter of Coutances,125 leading agent of King Henry II of England and his sons. Patron of literature, ambassador to the court of France, he was acquainted at ﬁrst hand with the ambitions of the rival monarch. This shrewd servant of the Plantagenet dynasty had every motive for receiving in the spirit of Schadenfreude with which it was in-

tumor erigat arcum (25). / Qua teres astricti mediam domat orbita cinctus, / Contrahitur ﬂexo laterum distancia lumbo, / Plenior ad pectus, tenuatur ad ilia, donec / Luxuriet renum gremio crescente volumen. / Invius excluse Veneri, secrecior ortus (30) / Flore pudicicie tenero pubescit; ibique / Vernat inattritus nec adulto saucius evo, / Nondum preda, Pudor, vacua qui regnat in aula, / Solus habens thalamos, ubi non admittitur hospes. / Temperat innocuas iuvenilis ﬂamma favillas, (35) / Nec Venus intrudit, quo mores pruriat, ignem, / Nec divertit Amor ad inhospita tecta Pudoris, / Nec nocet hic vel ea: mater face, ﬁlius arcu. / Improba non aperit vicii presumptio clausas / Clavigera virtute fores, adamante ligatur (40) / Ianua, quam voti gravitas infracta sigillat. / Pro foribus lanugo sedet, primoque iuvente / Vellere mollescit, nec multa in limine serpit, / Sed summo tenuem preludit margine muscum.” 123 See above, p. 314. On the tradition cf. A. Cizek, “Das Bild von der idealen Schönheit in der lateinischen Dichtung des Frühmittelalters,” MlJb 26 (1991), pp. 5– 35. 124 M. Wilks, “Alan of Lille and the New Man,” in Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, ed. D. Baker (Oxford, 1977), pp. 137– 57 with L. E. Marshall, “The Identity of the ‘New Man’ in the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille,” Viator 10 (1979), pp. 77– 88 and D. Shanzer, “Alan of Lille, Contemporary Annoyances and Dante,” Classica et Medievalia 40 (1984), p. 250 and n.4. 125 See T. De Mogembert in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclesiastique 20 (1984), pp. 87–88.

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tended John’s poetic subversion of a work that sought to erect an image of the Capetian superman. The Architrenius is thus a calculated move in a twelfth-century battle of books. Its political objectives provide a context, secondary and subordinate to the poem’s primarily bookish character. A summa of the Latin traditions of the genre, the Architrenius can be assimilated to none of the two classiﬁcations and eight subdivisions that have been proposed,126 because it encompasses them all. No subject, from the corruption of the clergy to the folly of the erudite, from the suffering of students to the manifold exempla of virtue and vice favored by other parodists, is omitted from its sweep. With unprecedented comprehensiveness, the Architrenius unleashes the full force of Medieval Latin parody on the Bildungsepos, which it strikes from the literary map. The contours of that map had been formed, since the second quarter of the twelfth century, by a tradition described at Metalogicon I, 24. Its values were echoed during the ﬁrst quarter of the next century by John of Hauvilla’s disciple, Gervase of Melkley, when he wrote in praise of the Architrenius: “a careful inspection of it is enough in itself to form a mind.”127 Less of an original thinker than a diligent pedagogue, Gervase referred, in the ﬁrst place, to the didactic qualities of John’s rhetorical style but he also recalled, in the second, the ideal of an opus consummatum, omnium artium . . . imago defended and celebrated in the Metalogicon. The time for celebration had passed a generation after the appearance of the Architrenius; the old ideal was no longer defensible in a new age of specialization. John of Hauvilla had recognized the change, recasting John of Salisbury’s exemplar, without putting anything positive in its place. Architrenius, the opposite of Alan’s vir perfectus, can also be viewed, in terms of the Metalogicon, as a variant on Corniﬁcius. The one is satirically portrayed by John of Salisbury as mastering everything at breakneck speed;128 the other is depicted by John of Hauvilla as understanding nothing at a snail’s pace. Complementary caricatures, they hinge on the issue of the unity of knowledge which the Metalogicon, like the Anticlaudianus, afﬁrms with special reference to literature. By literary means, the Architrenius undermines the foundation on which the case had been built for an integrated structure of learning and, by reducing it to rubble, prepares the way for the

126

P. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 25 –180. “Sola sufﬁcit inspectio studiosa rudem animum informare.” Ed. H.-J.- Gräbener, Gervais von Melkley, Ars Poetica (Münster, 1965), pp. 3, 24 –25. More informative than Gräbener’s edition are the reviews of it by R. Avesani, SM 3a ser., 7 (1966), pp. 749 – 60 and F. J. Worstbrock, Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum 88 (1967), pp. 99 –107. 128 Metalogicon 1, 3 – 4. 127

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divisions between the disciplines that took its stead. Nothing, in Latin letters, took the place of the Bildungsepos or its parody. There was to be no sequel to John’s poem—no continuation, no repeat. For the tradition from which it emerged and against which it reacted, the Architrenius sounded the death-knell. There remained, however, ghosts. From beyond the grave, generations after John of Hauvilla, arose a scurrilous specter that recalled, in a different form, the encyclopedism of the twelfth century. Necessity, probability, the various grades of veritas which had so seriously concerned the writers of the High Middle Ages: all these meant nothing to the rogue author of De vetula. Plausibility interested him less than a joke. This learned wag had seen the comic potential of the truth claims made by Latin writers before him, and he set out to exploit them, using poetry to authenticate forgery. Classical forgery and medieval poetry were not obviously compatible partners. The high status of Ethica, the low standing of literature, the principle of Christian truth might seem to have stood in the way of their union. Yet it was often consummated, with the aid of three compliant entremetteuses: mendacity, ingenuity, and credulity.129 Fiction, natural offspring of this clandestine coupling, dared not speak its name. Legitimated by the title of history, the antique imposture masqueraded in solemn costume. Or not so solemn, if the parent of an erudite fraud chose to disguise it as satire. Such is the De vetula, a Latin poem of the thirteenth century presented as Ovid’s autobiography.130 A difﬁcult task, on one view, given the absence of an ancient Life. An easy one, on another, since our “sole . . . source of information on the poet is the poet himself.”131 The second reading is superﬁcially more plausible. With (or without) Ovid’s evidence, biographies in abundance had been invented before De vetula.132 Some of them were so entertaining that they deserved if not credence, at least complicity. When Ovid’s assumed dislike of Virgil was referred to a leg broken while the poet of love, after an assignation with the empress Livia, was descending from her window by a bronze ladder, from which rungs had been removed by 129 Cf. R. Syme, Emperors and Biography. Studies in the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1971), pp. 263–80. 130 All references are to the edition of P. Klopsch, “Pseudo-Ovid, De vetula,” Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 2 (Leiden and Cologne, 1967). Cf. D. M. Robathan, The Pseudo-Ovidian “De vetula” (Amsterdam, 1968). 131 J. B. Trapp, “Ovid’s Tomb. The Growth of a Legend from Eusebius to Laurence Sterne, Chateaubriaud and George Richmond,” in his Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (London, 1990), p. 35 with rich documentation of the consequences. 132 Fundamental remains F. Ghisalberti, “Medieval Biographies of Ovid,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1949), pp. 10 – 59.

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malice,133

the master of epic what limits could be set to the suspension of disbelief?134 None, is the reply, so long as the Life was, or appeared to be, subordinate to the work and its edifying exegesis. That was required by the accessus ad auctores, in the context of which medieval Ovidian biography developed and on which it remained dependent.135 The accessus asked a number of familiar questions and laid down well-known rules of interpretation which fabricators of the poet’s vita both answered and evaded, followed and ﬂouted. The accessus-system was not inﬂexible, nor did it cramp creativity; but the framework it imposed on biography seemed ﬁxed and its dominance assured until the appearance of De vetula, in which the life and the opinions of an ancient author, allegedly recounted by himself, are identical with the work. This represented an experiment, a departure from the autobiographical conventions of the High Middle Ages.136 The individuality of De vetula should not be smothered under the blanket-label of pseudo-antique literature,137 for it stands apart from the medieval verse that passed under Ovid’s name.138 Not a pseudepigraphon but a forgery,139 this provocative work made its fraudulent claims to purvey autobiographical truth in poetry, the traditionally suspect medium of ﬁction.140 That ﬁctionality was what generations of poets before “Ovid” had been at pains to repudiate. In his version of Dares Phrygius, for example, the anonymous author of the Historia Troyana (c. 1150) voiced—in verse— the paradoxical denial: 133

Ibid., pp. 12 and 49. For more recent claims on credulity, see R. Syme, History in Ovid (Oxford, 1978). On the allied problem of ofﬁciosa mendacia, see M. Vincent-Cassy, “Recherches sur le mensonge au Moyen Age,” in Etudes sur la sensibilité au Moyen Age. Actes du 102e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1979), pp. 165–73. 135 See Ghisalberti, “Medieval Biographies of Ovid,” pp. 12ff. 136 Perhaps for this reason, De vetula is not mentioned by G. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie 3, 2, 2 ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1979) or 4,1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). 137 P. Lehmann, Pseudo-Antike Literatur des Mittelalters (reprint Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 13ff. (on De vetula). 138 See F. W. Lenz, “Einführende Bemerkungen zu den mittelalterlichen PseudoOvidiana,” Das Altertum 5 (1957), pp. 171– 82. 139 The distinction, seldom considered in the volumes edited by H. Fuhrmann, Fälschungen im Mittelalter (Hannover, 1988), is best discussed by B. Metzger, “Literary Forgeries and Canonical Pseudepigrapha,” New Testament Studiesm Philological, Versional, and Patristic (Leyden, 1980), pp. 1–22. Relevant too are the surveys of N. Brox, Falsche Verfasserangaben. Zur Erklärung der frühchristlichen Pseudepigraphie (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 81ff. and W. Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (Munich, 1971), pp. 30ff. 140 See R. McKeon, “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: The Renaissance of Rhetoric,” in Critics and Criticism. Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 297–318. 134

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“I am by no means to be called a poet, because I invent nothing.”141

Hence the protective cover of historia or integumentum, with their implications of factual and philosophical truth, assumed in the Latin epic and narrative verse of “Ovid’s” precursors. Nothing of the kind is essayed by the author of De vetula, who does not even attempt to seek corroboration from his homonym’s authentic works.142 Instead he ﬂaunts contemporary details, setting his poem squarely in a thirteenth-century context unmistakable, by an educated public interested in the monuments, mores, and history of classical Rome, as the Augustan age.143 The inability to tell the difference between antiquity and the present so often, so erroneously attributed to the Middle Ages does not account for this gifted writer’s refusal to observe the classicizing standards set by a Hildebert of Lavardin (whose works he knew and quoted) or a Walter of Châtillon. Shunning the artiﬁciality of classicism, declining the compromise of pseudepigraphy, turning his back on historical veritas,144 he struck out in a new and unsettling direction. The result has seemed a hybrid. The genre of De vetula was unorthodox, its medium dubious, its form composite. Allied to several models of literature established in the twelfth century, the poem owed allegiance to none of them. This has continued to give rise to confusion about its subject and purpose. It is a “philosophical epic,” according to one account,145 “incorporating the arts of love, sport, chess, medicine, satire, invective and comedy,”146 and less Ovid’s autobiography, on another version,147 than “a vision of the world of science.” Yet science, pseudo- and real, is combined in De vetula with the loftiest and the lowest themes of poetry current in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The aspiration, or rather the pretext, has been taken to be the ideal of united learning erected by Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille, only to be undermined by John of Hauvilla, who left in its place a rubble of unanswered questions. The 141 “Non ego sum, quoniam nil ﬁngo, poeta vocandus,” bk. V.12, Ed. J. Stohlmann, Anonymi Historia Troyana Daretis Frigii (Ratingen, 1968), p. 267 with P. von Moos, “Poeta und Historicus im Mittelalter. Zum Mimesis-Problem am Beispiel einiger Urteile über Lucan,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976), pp. 93 –130. 142 Klopsch, De vetula, 19. 143 See D. M Robathan, “Living Conditions in the Thirteenth Century as Reﬂected in the Pseudo-Ovidian De vetula,” in Studies in Honor of [B. L.] Ullman (Saint Louis, 1960), pp. 96–103. On twelfth-century interests in ancient Rome, see H. Bloch, “The New Fascination with Ancient Rome” and E. Kitzinger, “The Arts as Aspects of a Renaissance. Rome and Italy,” in Renaissance and Renewal, pp. 615 –70 with further bibliography. 144 Pace F. P. Knapp, “Calliope in Poetriae vinculis tenta,” in Retorica e poetica tra i secoli xii e xiv, ed C. Leonardi (Florence, 1988), p. 140. 145 Klopsch, De vetula, pp. 44 – 45. 146 Cf. Lehmann, Pseudo-Antike Literatur, pp. 13 –15. 147 Knapp, “Calliope in Poetriae,” p. 140.

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ﬁrst, the most pressing of these, was the nature of authority—especially the auctoritas of the classics, which had been a subject of debate among the twelfth-century moderni. Among the myriad of solutions that they offered, one common standpoint was consistently maintained: the freedom of imitatio, the liberty to transform or re-create an ancient source, thereby afﬁrming its contemporaneity and asserting one’s own title to be considered a classic.148 Adopting that position, De vetula offers not another pseudo-Ovidianum but what claims to be the real article, composed in order to demonstrate that its author (in the now outmoded terms of Alan of Lille’s epitaph) omne scibile scivit. Such pretensions to polymathy had become, even before the advent of thirteenth-century specialization, so old-fashioned that John of Hauvilla could treat them as a laughable illusion. In this sceptical setting De vetula, with its combination of false facts and real expertise,149 could not fail to acquire a comic air. Yet comedy, in the high medieval context of literature’s reﬂection about itself and the culture that produced it, involved more than mere delectatio.150 “Ovid’s” autobiography was ostensibly written to fulﬁl a function—an utilitas—which required a display of elaborate but bogus credentials. None was better than documentary evidence, authenticating a hitherto unknown work recently discovered, in a suitably distant location, under unusual circumstances. The opening of an ancient tomb in the cemetery of Dioscori, capital of Colchis; the ﬁnding of an epitaph composed in Armenian that certiﬁed the poem contained in an ivory box; plausible difﬁculties of translation solved by its despatch to Constantinople during the reign (over Nicaea not Byzantium) of John III Vatatzes (1222–54); publication by Leo, his protonotarius, scrinarius and a commentariis, who obligingly supplied a verse preface:151 such were the cause and occasion of De vetula’s appearance—all (naturally) lies, venerable lies, however, that stood in a long tradition of erudite imposture.152 An introitus 153 precedes Leo’s praefatio, on which follows one by the hand of the auctor.154 They, together with De vetula, are transmitted in the company of an accessus.155 Although the textual tradition points unequivocally to their common authorship, doubts have been raised on the 148

See above, p.00. E.g., I, 600ff. with J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), pp. 507ff. 150 See I. Suchomski, “‘Delectatio’ und ‘Utilitas,’” pp. 24ff. 151 Klopsch, De vetula, pp. 193– 94. 152 Cf. A. Grafton, Forgers and Critics. Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, 1990), pp. 3ff., and Trapp, “Ovid’s Tomb,” p. 42. 153 Klopsch, De vetula, pp. 193– 94. 154 Ibid., p. 194. 155 Ibid., pp. 279 – 87. 149

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grounds of shared or repeated information.156 These repetitions were designed to provide corroboration for the forgery that the accessus explains in a spirit similar to that of introitus and of the two praefationes. The different personae of Leo, author and exegete, play related roles in the sophisticated game of ﬁctio auctoris,157 enabling the poet of De vetula to act as its interpreter. Extended to the scholarly apparatus that had previously determined the structure of Ovidian biography, the convention of mutatio nominum158 now serves to liberate it. Assuming in the accessus the persona of a pedant, “Ovid” had difﬁculty in keeping a straight face. Swiftly succumbing to the temptations of the humor inherent in auto-exegesis, he listed the traditional seven (or four) causae and declared tongue-in-cheek: “You already know about the author’s life.”159 After this appeal to foreknowledge of details which only his poem contains, he mingled its spurious information with attested facts,160 encouraging the reader, insecure or complicit, to accept the mixture with relief or with irony. Such combinations of the genuine and the fraudulent were as old as forgery itself. So too the “canon” of pseudonymous and authentic works which follows the vita,161 establishing a false chronology that ends with De vetula. The parody of scholarly procedure becomes outrageous when the accessus launches into analysis of the work. Here, for example, is its anatomy of “Ovid’s” treatment of sex: The second part is divided again into two parts, the ﬁrst of which says how one should live that kind of love unconditionally; in the second how one should do so comparatively; and that in three ways: either at home or outside or in those activities which one may practice both indoors and outdoors, such as sport. And at home in two ways, either publicly in the courtyard or clandestinely in the bedroom, and then in or out of bed, and out of bed when on holiday or studying; in bed with or without company, and in the company of a virgin, married woman, or widow . . .162 156

Ibid., p. 190. See P. von Moos, “Fictio auctoris. Eine theoriegeschichtliche Miniatur am Rande der Institutio Traiani,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter 2, pp. 739ff., especially 763, 768, and 778. 158 Ibid., p. 750. 159 Klopsch, De vetula, p. 279, 1–10: “auctoris vita precognita.” 160 Ibid., p. 279, 13ff. 161 Ibid., p. 280, 30ff. 162 “Secunda pars in duas iterum partes dividitur. In quarum prima dicit, qualiter amore illius absolute vivebat, in secunda, qualiter comparative; et hoc tripliciter: vel in domo vel extra domum vel in eis, que tam intus quam foris exerceri contingit, sicut sunt ludi. Et in domo dupliciter, vel in aula publice vel in thalamo secrete, et hoc vel in lecto vel extra lectum, et extra lectum vel in otio vel studendo, in lecto vel in consortio vel sine eo, et in consortio vel virginis vel nupte vel vidue . . .” Ibid., 283, 164ff. 157

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And so on. Distinctiones without a difference, they ironize the hairsplitting techniques of scholastic method. Most of them are no more warranted by the work than the claims that the Pythagorean position adopted by Ovid at Metamorphoses 15163 is refuted in De vetula and that it concludes by demonstrating his conversion to Christianity.164 The moralizing exegesis common in the medieval tradition of Ovidian commentary and biography,165 like the logomachy of scholasticism, is pilloried in this accessus. Its hermeneutical and poetical fraud carries to an extreme the methodological principle of the text as the servant of its expositor. At a high literary level, “Ovid” also exploits what is attested in the lower, more popular legends that had accrued to his homonym:166 a tendency to poke fun at the excesses of pious and pedantic interpretation, to turn its techniques against themselves. It is in this sense that the accessus provides a key to the understanding of De vetula. Two simple but fundamental issues about the interpretation of this poem are raised by this accessus: why does it take the form of an autobiography, and why is so much of it concerned with Ovid’s sex life? Both questions point to the differences between this singular work and medieval pseudoOvidiana;167 and both had been answered by the classical poet himself: Believe you me, my habits are quite different from my poetry: (my life is restrained, my verse jolly); and a large part of my works consists in mendacious ﬁction, more permissive to itself than to its author.168

Vv. 353–54, repeatedly quoted by schoolmasters and moralists, formed one of the foundations of their view of Ovid as bonorum morum . . . instructor, malorum vero exstirpator.169 How shifting were the sands upon 163

Ibid., 286, 273ff. Ibid., 286, 287ff. 165 See ibid., pp. 41ff.; R. J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling. Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” “Epistulae ex Ponto” and “Epistulae Heroidum” (Munich, 1986); and F. Ghisalberti, “Arnulfo d’Orléans, un cultore d’Ovidio nel secolo XII,” Reale istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere. Memorie. Classe di lettere, scienze morali e storiche 24 (1932), pp. 157–234. 166 B. Bischoff, “Eine mittelalterliche Ovid-Legende,” in id., Mittelalterliche Studien 1, Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und Literatur-geschichte (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 144 – 59 and Trapp, “Ovid’s Tomb,” pp. 42– 43. 167 Notwithstanding the parodistic treatment of sexual themes in such pseudo-Ovidiana as De distributione mulierum, ed. W. Lenz, “Die Verteilung der Frauen,” Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 1 (1959), pp. 97–105. 168 “Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro: / (vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea) / magnaque pars mendax operum est et ﬁcta meorum, / plus sibi permisit compositore suo.” (Tristia 2, 353–56). 169 See Klopsch, De vetula, p. 41. 164

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which that foundation rested, De vetula demonstrates by turning vv. 355– 56 against their author. Fictive is opposed to real autobiography: “Ovid” sets out to show that Ovid was a liar. The distinction between his life and his works is rejected, and a dialectic is developed between the known verse and the “rediscovered” poem,170 ultimate opus of an older but wiser author anxious to set the record straight. This means, of course, setting it crooked. An elegant youth of gallant life, a connoisseur of mistresses, and an expert in their treatment, the “Ovid” of Book I animadverts on the perils of pregnancy and the avoidance of abortion (vv. 159ff.). Yet no sooner has he begin to exercise his traditional function as praeceptor amoris than he departs from it, advancing a doctrine that goes far beyond the enlightened sensualism of the Ars amatoria: Happy is he who could avoid life’s dangers, but far happier he who skirts scandals.171

This echo of one of the greatest didactic poems written in Latin,172 at the point where it describes the vanquishing of fear by knowledge, establishes the tone of “Ovid’s” satire. His are the didacticism of the cynic and the knowingness of the seducer. His only fears are exposure and consequent loss of face. Shame alone (rather a social than a moral emotion) arouses his scruples, which can be soothed by a balm of moralizing rhetoric: Ho hum, on what grounds did the father and lord of nature wish to implant his design that living beings should continuously procreate? For who would love, who would so long for ﬁlthy sex, were it not for bestial desire, were not the genitals endowed with such a mighty potential for delight!173

Blame thus conveniently shifted to God (vv. 204–5), “Ovid” is nearly free to paint his erotic picture of the sexual act (vv. 214ff.). First, however, he must dispose of the problem of sin: Let us posit a ﬁxed law of Nature and circumscribe that one called “positive,” according to which I sin if I do what is prohibited— not because it is a sin, but on account of the prohibition.174 170

Echoed in the accessus. See above, p. 327. “Felix, qui posset vitare pericula, sed qui / scandala vitaret, longe felicior esset” (1, 191–92). 172 Virgil, Georgic 2.458 (unnoticed by Klopsch ad loc.). 173 “Ha, quantis voluit rationibus insinuare / Nature pater et dominus se velle, quod usque / propagarentur animalia, nam quis amaret, / quis tantum appeteret nisi bruto ductus amore / tam foedum coitum, nisi delectatio tanta / tamque potens esset genitalibus indita membris!” (vv. 198 –203). 174 “Legem Nature ﬁxam ponamus et illam / circumscribamus modo, que positiva 171

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Mortal sin (peccatum) is no problem for this scholastic sophist; what matters is transgression against human laws (prohibitum). And who is better equiped to judge how unjust, how equivocal such precepta can be than the praeceptor amoris himself? . . . If I fail to respect the precept, that is not because it is just, but because it is a precept. . . . (vv. 210–11)175

Circumlocution becomes contradiction; deﬁnition is balanced (and checked) by counterdeﬁnition; and the scholastic style parodied in the prose of the accessus is burlesqued in the verse of De vetula: I speak only of those things that are circumscribed by such a law, lest in my verbosity I make a mess and seem to have spoken against the law.176

In the high-medieval debate about the function of sexuality and the control of desire,177 casuistry was not unusual. But only the De amore of Andreas Capellanus178 offered a precedent for the send-up of prescriptive style in De vetula. First subverted, then reconstructed by his homonym, the auctoritas of Ovid is usurped. Forgery afﬁrms the claims of the medieval over the ancient author, and parody appropriates the themes that he had monopolized. All inhibitions abolished, every restriction removed, love becomes the subject of a comedy of errors (2, 230ff.) that depicts the misadventures of an exclusus amator, ineptly banging his head against the door of his mistress’s house before gaining entry, only to ﬁnd in her bed a hideous crone. Even patience rewarded and suffering requited are surveyed with a caustic eye. Winning his lost love after an interval of twenty years, “Ovid” consummates his postponed passion with allusive irony: What she was like, it is a pleasure to recall; and she demonstrates, in her reduced state, how ﬁne she was in her prime. (2, 669 –70)179

vocatur; / in qua peccabo, si fecero quod prohibetur, / non quia peccatum sit, sed quoniam prohibetur” (vv. 206 – 9). 175 “ . . . preceptum si negligo, non quia iustum, / sed quia preceptum . . .” (vv. 210 –11). 176 “ . . . Circumscripta modo tali / lege loquor, ne multa loquens immiscuerim quid, / quod contra legem possim dixisse videri” (vv. 211–13). 177 See J. W. Baldwin, “Five Discourses on Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Northern France around 1200,” Speculum 66 (1991), pp. 797– 819 and The Language of Sex. Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago, 1994). 178 See R. Schnell, Andreas Capellanus. Zur Rezeption des römischen und kanonischen Rechts in “De Amore” (Münster, 1982). 179 “Quod fuerat, meminisse iuvat; quantique fuisset / integra, fracta docet . . .” (2, 669– 70).

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The allusion is to Hildebert’s celebrated lament on the ruins of Rome;180 the irony points to the purpose for which this work was written. To the antiquity idealized by Hildebert and other twelfth-century poets, De vetula pays little attention. The classical world serves as a mere backdrop to the stage upon which “Ovid,” dressed in medieval costume, plays the part of a satirist. A caricature of his former self, this disabused spokesman of modernity offers his audience such fruits of his experience as the travails of a womanizer, elaborate accounts of chess (I, 260ff.), and detailed instructions for ﬁshing (I, 339ff.). . . .181 All this was not intended to be understood as philosophical epic, scientiﬁc discourse, or didactic literature. Antididactic, an expansion and inversion of Book 2 of the Tristia, De vetula deﬂates the ethical and encyclopedic pretensions of Ovidius, bonorum morum . . . instructor, malorum exstirpator.182 In their stead it puffs with equivocal praise the skills of the specialist, the savoir-faire of the man of the world, the accomplishments of the astronomer—cum—astrologer— cum—mathematician whose talent is proved by his capacity to do complicated sums in verse (I, 405ff.). For the philosophical aspirations of twelfthcentury epic, the cosmic themes of a Bernardus Silvestris or an Alan of Lille, De vetula substitutes a world without illusions dominated by pedants and fools. Even “Ovid’s” supposed conversion to Christianity, at the end of Book 4, is occasioned by neither faith nor revelation but by a display of celestial science, designed to dazzle the poem’s readers. Yet the virtuosity of the new Ovid, and the delectatio at which he aimed, did not lack an utilitas—a point and a target. The object of his onslaught was the encyclopedic ideal of the previous century. Dissolved into its component parts, the standards of uniﬁed learning and of human perfectibility are laughed to scorn, as the methods of scholasticism are pilloried in this preview of the Gelehrtensatire of the Enlightenment.183 And that is where some of the later analogies to De vetula are to be found: in such satires as Johann Burkhart Mencke’s De charlataneria eruditorum, with its attack on the empty humanism and arid encyclopedism of the polyhistors.184 In this forgery designed to draw attention to its suspect character yet capable of commanding faith, the new Ovid raised, for both the sceptical and the complicit among an audience versed in the rules of ﬁctio auctoris, the 180 “Par tibi, Roma nihil cum sis prope tota ruina / quam magni fueris integra, fracta doces.” Carm. 36, 1–2, ed. Scott. 181 On which see B. Löfstedt, “Zu De vetula,” MlJb 28 (1993), pp. 97–100. 182 On the “encyclopedic” Ovid, see S. Viarre, La Survie d’Ovide dans la littérature scientiﬁque aux xiie et xiiie siècles (Poitiers, 1966), pp. 79ff. 183 A useful survey is provided by W. Martens, “Von Thomasius bis Lichtenberg: Zur Gelehrtensatire der Aufklärung,” Lessing Yearbook 10 (1978), pp. 7– 34. 184 For context see A. Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopaedism,” Central European History 18 (1985), pp. 31– 47.

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issue of the ambiguity of historical truth. Contrary to the rules of evidence, against the criteria of necessity and probability, he emphasized not what was but what might be believed. Credulity was his target, modernism his attitude, irony his mode. No worshipper of the classics, he employed them to his own ends. This dwarf perched on the shoulders of Bernard of Chartres and his followers had learned their lesson of emulative imitation. Emulation of antiquity entailed not merely rivaling its achievements but replacing them. And if he claimed to see further than his predecessors in the tradition of scientia de omni scibili, the reason was that he knew how to buttress the truth-claims of fraud with the apparatus of high medieval scholarship. Against solemn moralizers and humorless pedants, “Ovid” turned the tools of their trade in the provocative spirit of his namesake: My genius is my companion and my delight.185

So it was that, in the poetry of the thirteenth century, the concordantia artium of the twelfth was turned on its head. 185

“ingenio tamen ipse meo comitor fruorque” (Tristia 3.7.47).

H

H

IX THE HANDLE OF THE KNIFE

K

NOWLEDGE,” declared Robert Pullen (as reported by Peter the Chanter), “is like the handle of a knife.”1 Comparing its blade with the power to bind and loose, Pullen was addressing the controversial issue of qualiﬁcations for the priesthood. This debate, which continued throughout the twelfth century, found a focus in the question of the sacerdotal “key” or authority to administer penance. Just as the hand that slices bread is cut by a blade without a handle, argued Pullen, so power can do harm when it is not tempered by knowledge. If the interdependence of learning and auctoritas is exempliﬁed in his image, it also conveys the sense of danger, the need for caution felt by the generation of intellectuals that had witnessed the fate of Peter Abelard. Abelard’s rival, Bernard of Clairvaux, would not have quarreled with this analogy drawn by his protégé among the Parisian masters. He might have wondered, however, who was to hold the knife. In his attempt to wield it at Reims in 1148, Bernard’s own hand had been cut. Potestas, he had then learned, did not belong to him who, on his own initiative, tried to excise a cankered crust from the panis of the church. Between that bread and its would-be slicer stood the cardinals and the pope. The magistri who furnished the knife’s handle were not necessarily their opponents. Power could ally with scholarship, as Robert Pullen understood. He knew of the connections, multiple and increasing, between the Parisian schools and the Roman curia. He was aware of theology’s tendency, evident since the eleventh century and pronounced in the work of Abelard, to represent itself as heresy-hounding. And he had seen the consequences when self-styled inquisitors made doctrinal claims on their own authority. Hence Pullen’s image of interdependence coupled with reciprocal advantage. Diplomatically ambiguous, he did not need to specify that a handle without a knife is of limited use or that a blade without guidance may do uncontrollable damage. Limits and control were staples of high medieval discourse. Those who, unlike Abelard, observed such ﬁnes might

“

1 “Magister Robertus Puella dicebat quod scientia est quasi manubrium, potestas uero ligandi et soluendi sicut lamina cultelli. Et sicut lamina manum incidit, cum tenetur sine manubrio ad scindendum panem, ita potestas ledit sine scientia, que est quasi temperamentum lamine, que est potestas ligandi et soluendi.” Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis 2, ed. J.-A. Dugaughier, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 7, 140, p. 329, 22–27.

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rise high. Elevated to the purple, Master Robert Pullen was entrusted with the chancellorship of the Holy Roman Church. The church required men of learning. Litteratura had become a qualiﬁcation for high ofﬁce. The highest ofﬁce of ecclesiastical authority was now being occupied by intellectuals. Not only the famous scholar-popes of the later twelfth century, Alexander III and Innocent III, exercised their magisterium with methods informed by, or intelligible to, the masters in the schools but also their underrated predecessor, Eugenius III. That failed gardener, that sensitive plant (as he was described to the curia by his former abbot) displayed a strength of character and a shrewdness in dealing with the troublesome magistri for which he has not been given due credit. That is why it is worth pausing to reﬂect, with a sympathy often denied Eugenius III, on his position and actions in, or around, 1148. At that turning-point in the intellectual history of the twelfth century, the pope’s position was weak.2 Exiled from Rome, dependent on the support of the French and English hierarchies mobilized by Bernard of Clairvaux to proscribe Gilbert of Poitiers, Eugenius III was forcefully reminded of the precedent set by Innocent II, who had anathematized Abelard. Yet the vacillator portrayed by John of Salisbury ﬁrmly declined to follow suit. Pressure from the sacred college inﬂuenced Eugenius’s decision, but the manner in which he formulated it was his own—his own in that he grasped, with the aid or the example of Nicola Maniacutia, that principles of textual criticism could be applied to problems of heresy. The distinction between the real intentions and the reported opinions of an author, obscured in Abelard’s case; the criterion of the integrity of a writer’s work; its place in ecclesiastical tradition and its context; the insistence on public debate of the issues, rather than summary condemnation of error; the allowance made for self-correction and the skill displayed in conciliation of the disputing parties—all this was more than an attempt to save face in trying circumstances. It amounted to a policy. Avoiding censura repressiva, Eugenius III set the conditions for censura praevia. And he showed how it could function in the case of Bernardus Silvestris. On the kind of hasty or superﬁcial reading of his book to which Bernard of Clairvaux was prone, there is far more material in the Cosmographia than in the writings by Gilbert of Poitiers to evoke suspicion of heresy. Confronted with both at the end of the 1140s, the pope did not damn Gilbert’s difﬁculty or recoil at Bernardus’s boldness. He expressed an approval that was a factor in the swift and lasting success of the Cosmographia. Its author had satisﬁed the rules of a procedure Abelard failed to follow, and was granted the twelfth century’s version of the nil obstat. In2

See above, pp. 139ff.

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tended to protect the intellectuals Bernardus and Gilbert, papal censorship, under Eugenius III, was tolerant. Tolerance implied veriﬁcation.3 Hence Robert of Melun’s hermeneutics. Related to the decisions of 1148, they elaborate Abelard’s thought on the subject. Alerter than his former colleague to the ecclesiological aspects of this problem, Robert recognized that the interpreter’s authority entailed a hierarchical structure of auctoritates, without developing the implications of his own idea. He was writing Sententiae, not composing a full-blown treatise on the church; and if he, like his contemporaries, omitted to address in extenso the issue of where ultimate responsibility lay, tribute must be paid to Robert of Melun for grasping that the self-consistency of scholarship, by the mid twelfth century, was neither an adequate argument nor a compelling defense. This Abelard, on his premises, was reluctant to concede and, in his circumstances, disinclined even to perceive. He derived his claim to speak out from the rigor of his logic and from the example of his models. John the Baptist, Origen, and Saint Jerome justiﬁed his sacralization of the philosopher with more than a touch of the prophet. Such was the magisterium at which Abelard aimed—not just the role of theologyprofessor avant la lettre. Such was also the part that Bernard of Clairvaux sought to play, especially after the lesson of 1148 imparted by his fellow-Cistercian. It continued to smart. But if Bernard, agile and adaptable, then attempted to soften the blow by developing, in De consideratione, his own version of the same persona, he did not make the mistake repeated by Abelard in his theological works.4 De consideratione is addressed to the pope. Never, in the course of his voluminous writings, did Bernard’s rival ascribe them to an inﬂuential patron or request the approval of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. That came only at the end of his career, as reported by Peter the Venerable. Impeccable in such matters, as the letter prefatory to Contra Petrobrusianos shows, the abbot of Cluny stands in vivid contrast to his namesake. Publicly canvasing support only from his acolytes, Peter Abelard represented himself as his chief prop and stay. Its support was shakier than he thought, when Stephen of Garland fell from power. It would not do, by 1140, to drop the names of high-placed pupils in the Roman curia. Nor was it enough for a writer on doctrinal matters to declare his willingness to revise his solecisms and remove his errors. The gravest of them lay not in 3 Cf. I. Bejezy, “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), pp. 365– 84 and M. Colish, “Christological Nihilianism in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century,” RTAM 63 (1996), pp. 144 – 55. 4 Excluded is De dialectica, because (depending on how the work is dated) its dedication to an unspeciﬁed frater (Abelard’s brother or a fellow-monk?) has no institutional signiﬁcance.

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what he wrote but in conduct that placed him beyond the bounds of the clergy. Proclaiming his innocence, publice, before an audience that included the laity in 1121 or comparing his followers and himself to perfecti, Abelard cultivated that heroic self-image that many have accepted on its own terms. Those terms, however, were liable to be construed less favorably in their original context. What he viewed as the solitary splendor of the individualist might be regarded, in the twelfth century, as the heretic’s isolation. “Individualism” of this kind, dubious in a monk teaching outside the cloister, combined with the anti-establishment traits of Abelard’s critique of the abbots or bishops, and views on the sacrament of penance were not the only factors that secured his condemnation. His pupils also contributed to his downfall, exaggerating and misconstruing his meaning. Aware that oral tradition had distorted Abelard’s message, Gilbert of Poitiers succeeded in establishing a distinction between the source and its tainted tributaries. But if authenticity became an argument of defense, recognized by Eugenius III and developed by Robert of Melun, it did not dispose of a major problem raised by the thought of the twelfth-century magistri. Their ideal of concordantia artium, which depicted the teacher as a hierophant and his pupils as an elite, lent itself to caricature by its critics as the ideology of a sect. Expounded after Abelard by Gilbert of Poitiers, Thierry of Chartres, and William of Conches, the same controversial position also ﬁgures in John of Salisbury’s work. All these names appear in modern accounts of the origins of the university of Paris.5 The thrust of the argument—its explicit and unchallenged teleology—is toward corporatism.6 The universitas magistrorum et scolarium, we are told, should not be equated with a universitas scientiarum. This is true. But because the problem has been generally considered in institutional terms, little attention has been paid to ideas. Among the ideas espoused by Abelard, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers, and others, one, central but neglected, was irreconcilable with corporatism. Concordantia artium—the unity of learning, the comprehensiveness of culture—as advocated by these scholars was not a product of the schools, nor is it compatible with the hypothesis of the university’s development from magistri like them. Polemically opposed to the notion of intellectual community, concordantia artium was designed to justify their separateness and to denigrate their rivals as blinkered specialists or boastful charlatans. Withdrawal from the common herd—from what William of 5 For a guide to the large bibliography on this subject, see J. Verger, “Grundlage,” in Geschichte der Universität in Europa, 1: Mittelalter, ed. W. Rüegg (Munich, 1993), pp. 49ff. 6 See P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas. Expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen-Age latin, L’Eglise et l’Etat au Moyen Age 13 (Paris, 1970).

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Conches dismissed as “peasants of the intellect,” Thierry of Chartres scorned as “ham-actors,” and John of Salisbury castigated as “Corniﬁcians”—animated that ideal. Echoed in the acerbities of the Metalogicon, it ﬁnds gentler expression in the Cosmographia. None of these thinkers would have accepted the part assigned to them, in histories of the university, as proto-professors. All of them aspired to more. And each of them shared with the others an awareness of a pressing problem in their culture. As writers—grammatici in the sense of practitioners or theorists of the arts of language—they resisted the devaluation of grammatica in favor of the “higher” disciplines. Antiquity’s argument that, in order to read and write philosophy, the philosophus must command philological skills,7 was not sufﬁcient for Bernardus Silvestris. On the model of Bernard of Chartres, he composed a Gesamtkunstwerk that embodied, in literature, the philosophical dimensions of that subject. With similar intentions but a more practical purpose, John of Salisbury set out to show, in the Metalogicon and Policraticus, how hermeneutical methods drawn from the same discipline could be applied to life. The grammaticus, dull drudge in the eyes of his enemies, was defended by John and Bernardus, who showed that he was capable of probing the indeterminacy of creation and of guiding a future archbishop. These were not humble goals in the twelfth century. They aimed to link universal learning with intellectual leadership. Nowhere is that link more ﬁrmly drawn than in the prologue to the Heptateuchon by Thierry of Chartres.8 There personiﬁed Grammatica, a “matron severe in appearance and dress,” presides over what is tellingly termed a “synod” of the liberal arts. Quicquid dicit[ur] auctoritati eius committitur, comments Thierry. Alan of Lille would not have quibbled with the assertion, except to add that her jurisdiction was subject to that of theology. In the stability of an epistemological order similar to that of the church, no further reﬂection was needed. The issue was not an institution but a hierarchy of knowledge. That is why the silence of Alan, Peter the Chanter, and their circle about the rise of the university of Paris9 should cause no eyebrows to be raised. The phenomenon was beneath the notice and alien to the attitudes of the individualists who practiced concordantia artium. They would not have been satisﬁed with the cold comfort of a chair. Exponents of higher culture, they sought to become its arbiters. Arbitration of orthodoxy, to which theological magister wished to contribute, was a perilous undertaking when he possessed no clearly deﬁned 7 Cf. R. Kassel, “Winkelbrummer. Antike Kritik an Philologie und Philologen,” in id., Kleine Schriften (Berlin, 1991), pp. 79 – 87. 8 See above, p. 162. 9 Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants 1, p. 76.

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institutional status. The “dialectician” Abelard was only the most spectacular victim of that voracious dialectic of heresy that, throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, devoured its own children. Spare a thought for Berengar of Tours and Roscelin. Neither of them intended to be branded as a dissident. Both craved recognition and, when they achieved notoriety, pleaded for a measure of tolerance before Abelard lifted that cause on his banner. Raised in deﬁance of the condemnation at Soissons, it failed to protect him from the suspicion of which all, in the divisive atmosphere of the second and third quarters of the twelfth century, were prone to fall foul. The consequent retreat, by Thierry and William, from the whirlpool of strife that had its vortex in Paris, or the distance from the schools expressed in John of Salisbury’s nostalgia for Chartres and Bernardus Silvestris’s celebration of Tours provide coordinates of an intellectual map that is different from the one customarily drawn by histories of the university. They place the institution at a center on which converged single masters, animated by a common sense of purpose—or, at least, of advantage. When that development occurred, it owed little to the exponents of concordantia artium. And if some of their attitudes persisted among later generations, they offered scant solace to the professionals of the establishment. It was in the critical spirit of the twelfth-century magistri when Philip the Chancellor, in the thirteenth, deplored the illusions of corporatism, lamented the increase of numbers that led to a decline of quality, and praised the achievements of the pre-universitarian age.10 Why the ideal of concordantia artium, mocked in the parody of the Architrenius and pilloried in the forgery of De vetula, did not and could not produce the results it promised was inherent in the character of the enterprise. The individualism and elitism designed to establish the primacy of its advocates proved incapable of convening the “synod” imagined at the opening of Thierry’s Heptateuchon. Divided among themselves, each of these scholars had only a limited authority of his own;11 and it was not until 10 “Olim quando unusquisque erat in sui magistratus ofﬁcio singularis nec etiam noverat nomen universitatis, frequentius legebant, frequentius disputabant, ardentius studiis insistebant, nunc autem convenientibus vobis in unum, idest facientibus universitatem, iam non est cena Domini. Raro legitur, raro disputatur, multum expenditur, parum addiscitur, quia lectionibus et disputationibus tempus substrahitur, quod crebris tractatibus et conventiculis indulgetur. . . . Dum etiam maiores conveniunt ad tractandum et ad constituendum, ad obligandum minores maiorum auctoritate fulti et freti, pessimas ad invicem faciunt obligationes et coniurationes, noctu conveniunt. . . .” Ed. J. Schneyer, Die Sittenkritik in den Predigten Philipps des Kanzlers, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 39/4 (Münster, 1962), pp. 90– 91 with W. Malazcek, “Das Papsttum und die Anfänge der Universität im Mittelalter,” Römische Historische Mitteilungen 27 (1985), pp. 85–143, esp. 94ff. See further below. 11 For the negative connotations of auctoritate sua in Gratian, cf. S. Kuttner, “On Auctoritas in the Writings of Medieval Canonists: the Vocabulary of Gratian,” in La notion d’auto-

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after the magistri, as a group or a faculty, had learned to collaborate with the authorities of the church that conditions existed in which the Parisian masters of theology, during and after the 1240s, could function as a semisynodal body to deﬁne doctrine and condemn error.12 A step in that direction was taken in 1215, when the papal legate, Cardinal Robert of Courson, enlisted the aid of his former colleagues to draft statutes for the university of Paris.13 By then Alan of Lille had been dead for more than a decade. Neither he nor the magistri who preceded him may be imagined as the member of a committee. Their contribution to the alliance between learning and authority lay in the censorship that Alan—so sensitive to the needs of the hour, yet so aware of the past’s example—made his model of scholarship. Stabler conditions of work, an institution that lent form and content to Robert Pullen’s analogy of the handle and the blade, and a regulated but recognized profession: these factors created milieux different from those in which Abelard had struggled and suffered. His development can be interpreted as a series of attempts to fashion a role that did not yet exist before he returned to what, in Peter the Venerable’s view, was his proper part as a monk. But Abelard, if exceptional, did not stand alone. The alternatives that he tried to formulate to his due station, as understood with the reformers’ strictness, had parallels in other efforts, by the intellectuals of his own and subsequent generations, to follow a similar course. John of Salisbury, anticourtier and philosopher “by stealth,” William of Conches, “dropout” from the schools and tutor to a secular prince; Thierry of Chartres, despiser of the riffraff that infested the classrooms of Paris; Bernardus Silvestris, supplement or surrogate to the theologians and dialecticians; Alan of Lille, a faculty in himself with inquisitorial ambitions: all these magistri presented themselves, in their writings, as alternatives to traditional models of clerical culture. It is difﬁcult to square their strivings

rité au Moyen Age, ed. G. Makdisi, Colloques internationaux de la Napoule 23 –26 octobre, 1978 (Paris, 1982), pp. 69 – 81, esp. 79. 12 J. Miethke, “Papst, Ortsbischof und Universität in den Pariser Theologenprozessen des 13. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Auseinandersetzungen an der Pariser Universität im 13. Jahrhundert, ed. A. Zimmermann, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 10 (Berlin, 1976), pp. 52– 94, esp. 68ff. Cf. id., “Die Kirche und die Universitäten im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Schulen und Studium, ed. Fried, 285–321 and P. McKeon, “Concilium Generale and Studium Generale: The Transformation of Doctrinal Regulation in the Middle Ages,” Church History 35 (1966), pp. 24– 34, esp. 29. 13 See S. Ferruolo, “The Parisian Statutes of 1215 Reconsidered,” History of Universities 5 (1985), pp. 1–14. Cf. G. de Vergottini, “Lo Studio di Bologna, l’impero, il papato,” in Dissertationes historicae de universitate studiorum Bononensi . . . missae (Bologna, 1956), pp. 1– 95, esp. 84ff.

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with motives that derive the university from love of pure learning or the needs of new professions.14 The place of the intellectual was changing, and each of these authors sought to forge an identity that might accommodate, or transcend, the dissatisfaction that he experienced with his circumstances. In the ensuing dialectic between convention and innovation, the litteratura of the High Middle Ages, with all its variety and reﬁnement, presents a pattern of alternatives, from which even the Archpoet did not deviate. That is why prevailing categories of literary history, which assimilate him to a type, are inadequate to grasp his achievement. It was effected not in the company of the “Goliards” but in the entourage of Barbarossa’s minister. Motivated by polemic against those, at or linked with Rome, who counted as Reinald of Dassel’s enemies, the provocations of this calculating wit, seen in context, tell us more about a twelfth-century writer’s ability to defy orthodox models than yet another study of his sources or repetition of tired clichés about wine, women, and song. But if we must renounce such illusions, consolation may be found in imagining the reaction to the Archpoet’s “Confessio” of the arch-Cistercian. For Bernard of Clairvaux, had he survived to read the work, would have been capable of repaying its affronts in kind. Saint or heretic, he was beyond doubt a consummate satirist. Bernard’s spirit lived on. Combined with the attitudes of his opponents, it animated the invective directed against the university of Paris by Stephen of Tournai at the end of the twelfth century. Experienced in denouncing the verborum strepitus et disputationum anfractus in the schools,15 he had already poured scorn on their “showmen of letters” before launching into his broadside of 1192–1203.16 Nothing that Stephen, in that jeremiad on 14 Grundmann, “Vom Ursprung der Universität im Mittelalter,” in id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Stuttgart, 1976 –78), 3, pp. 292– 342 and Classen, “Die hohen Schulen und die Gesellschaft im 12. Jahrhundert,” and “Universitätsreformen und Universitätsgründungen des Mittelalters,” both in id., Studium und Gesellschaft, im Mittelalter, ed. J. Fried (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 1–26 and 170– 96. Cf. J. Verger, “Des écoles à l’université: La Mutation institutionelle,” in La France de Philippe Auguste. Le Temps des mutations, ed. R.-H. Bautier (Paris, 1982), pp. 817–46 and id., “A propos de la naissance de l’université de Paris: Contexte social, enjeu politique, portée intellectuelle,” in Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. J. Fried (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 69 – 96. 15 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis 1, ed. H. Deniﬂe and E. Chatelain (Paris, 1889), p. 43 (no. 42). 16 “Ad papam. Impetrata venia loquamur ad dominum nostrum, cuius mansuetudo nostram suscitat audaciam, prudentia sustinet imperitiam, patientia promittit impunitatem. Compellit hinc nos majorum auctoritas, inde morbus paulatim serpens, cujus molestie, si non occurritur in primis, incurabilis est in extremis. Nec hoc dicimus, pater, tanquam velimus esse aut morum censores aut doctorum iudices aut doctrinarum discussores—fortiores humeros sarcina ista requirit et robustos athletarum spiritualium lacertos pugna hec expectat. Id tantum, quod dolet, signiﬁcare volumus sancte paternitati vestre, cui Deus contulit et potestatem corripiendi

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the age, had to reproach the professors of Paris would have been unknown to the magistri half a century earlier. All of it had been said by them or by Bernard in identical language. The charge of haggling about the trinity on “the highways and byways” leveled against Abelard by his opponents and echoed in the French episcopate’s letter to Innocent II,17 like the accusations, so familiar to Rupert of Deutz, of vanity and presumption in writing about theological subjects with which the fathers of the church had already dealt,18 was capped, in Stephen of Tournai’s letter, by the key term publice used in the 1140s to condemn such disputes. Disputantur publice: contrary to the distinction between clergy and laity,19 the mysteries of the faith were being violated in open debate. When Stephen described the shroud of secrecy profaned by the vulgarizers as inerrores et scientiam corrigendi. Lapsa sunt apud nos in confusionis ofﬁcinam sacrarum studia litterarum, dum et discipuli solis novitatibus applaudunt, et magistri glorie potius invigilant quam doctrine, novas recentesque summulas et commentaria ﬁrmantia super theologia passim conscribunt, quibus auditores suos demulceant, detineant, decipiant, quasi nondum suffecerint sanctorum opuscula patrum, quos eodem spiritu sacram scripturam legimus exposuisse, quo eam composuisse credimus apostolos et prophetas. Ignota et peregrina convivis suis apponunt fercula. . . . Disputantur publice contra sacras constitutiones de incomprehensibili deitate, de incarnatione verbi verbosa caro et sanguis irreverenter litigat. Individua trinitas et in triviis secatur et discrepitur, ut tot jam sint errores quot doctores, tot scandala quot auditoria, tot blasphemie quot platee. Rursus si ventum fuerit ad iudicia que iure canonico sint tractanda vel a vobis commissa vel ab ordinariis iudicibus cognoscenda, profertur a venditoribus inextricabilis silva decretalium epistolarum quasi sub nomine sancte recordationis Alexandri pape, et antiquiores sacri canones abiiciuntur, respuuntur, expuuntur. Hoc involucro prolato in medium ea que in conciliis sanctorum patrum salubriter instituta sunt, nec formam conciliis nec ﬁnem negociis imponunt prevalentibus epistolis, quas forsitan advocati conductim sub nomine romanorum pontiﬁcum in apothecis sive cubiculis suis conﬁngunt et conscribunt. Novum volumen ex eis compactum et in scolis solempniter legitur et in foro venaliter exponitur. . . . Vel duo predicta sunt, et ecce restat tertium vel: facultates quas liberales appellant amissa libertate pristina in tantam servitutem devocantur, ut comatuli adolescentes earum magisteria impudentes usurpent, et in cathedra seniorum sedeant imberbes, et qui nondum norunt esse discipuli laborant, ut nominentur magistri. Conscribunt et ipsi summulas suas pluribus salivis efﬂuentes et madidas philosophorum sale nec conditas. Omissis regulis artium abjectisque libris autenticis artiﬁcum muscas inanium verborum sophismatibus suis tamquam aranearum tendiculis includunt. Clamat philosophia vestes suas conscindi et disrumpi, et quibusdam particulariter seminanciis nuditatem suam verecunde contegens, nec consulitur ab antiquo, nec antiquam consolatur. Hec omnia, pater, correptionis apostolice manum desiderant, ut informitas docendi, discendi, disputandi auctoritate vestra certam redigatur ad formam, ne sermo divinus attricione vulgari vilescat, ne in angulis dicatur: ‘Ecce hic Christus’ aut ‘ecce illic,’ ne sanctum canibus et margarite porcis conculcande tradantur.” Ibid., pp. 47– 48 (no. 48). For context see O. Lewry, OP, “Papal Ideals and the University of Paris 1170 – 1203,” in The Religious Roles of the Papacy: Ideals and Realities 1150–1300, ed. W. Ryan (Toronto, 1984), pp. 363– 88, esp. 365ff. 17 See above, p. 101. 18 See above, p. 24. 19 See above, p. 20.

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volucrum, his diction revealed his acquaintance with integumental theories that reached from the theologies of Abelard to the prologue of Alan’s Anticlaudianus.20 Beardless youths with ﬂowing locks occupied chairs of magisterial authority, moaned Stephen of Tournai; philosophy’s robe was torn to pieces; and through the fragments or rags of that once seamless garment the nakedness of knowledge was exposed—a tissue of topoi woven together from William of Conches’s polemic.21 Stephen was not a crank, but the heir to a tradition that extended over the course of the twelfth century. Skillful at diagnosing cultural malaise, he was, like his predecessors, less capable of offering a cure. No profession was envisaged as an antidote to these ills, nor was any institution other than the papacy imaginable, at the turn of the High Middle Ages, as prescribing how the patient should be restored to health. While denying that he wished to be a morum censor, Stephen of Tournai might exercise that function informally, but his effectiveness, as a critic, depended on the response from Rome. Hence the point and piquancy with which he used the language of the silent masters. Speech and teaching, restored to the comeliness of their pristine order (ut informitas docendi, discendi, disputandi auctoritate vestra certam redigatur ad formam, ne sermo divinus attricione vulgari vilescat), should be permitted only within the limits of a freedom overseen by papal control. Freedom, understood in the double sense of the aggregate of scholars’ privileges and as the right to discover the truth,22 entailed control. If such was the conclusion that emerged, gradually, from high medieval discourse on this subject, no malign or inexorable logic led to repression on the part of authority.23 Censorship, both ﬁgurative and literal, was neither suddenly nor arbitrarily imposed by intolerant popes in the thirteenth and fourteenth 20

See above, p. 300. See above, pp. 228ff. 22 For the ﬁrst sense, see P. Classen, “Libertas scolastica—Scholaren Privilegien— Akademische Freiheit im Mittelalter,” in id., Studium und Gesellschaft, pp. 238 – 84; for the second, F.-X. Putallaz, Insolente liberté. Controverses et condemnations au xiiie siècle (Paris, 1995), pp. 310ff. Cf. J. Thijssen, “Academic Heresy and Intellectual Freedom at the University of Paris, 1200 –1378,” in Centres of Learning. Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, ed. J. Drijvers (Leiden, 1995), pp. 217–28 and E. Peters, “Libertas Inquirendi and the Vitium Curiositatis in Medieval Universities” and G. Constable, “Liberty and Free Choice in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in La Notion de liberté au Moyen Age. Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. G. Makdisi, Penn-Paris-Dumbarten Oaks Colloquia 4 (Paris, 1985), pp. 89 – 98 and 99–118. 23 Pace B. Schimmelpfennig, “Des Grossen Brüders Grossmutter. Die christliche Inquisition als Vorläuferin des modernen Totalitarianismus,” in Die Anfänge der Inquisition, ed. Segel, pp. 285–96: “Die Unbedingtheit einer Anschauung führt zu Intoleranz und Repression, schliesslich zur Eliminierung des Anderen” (285). 21

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centuries.24

It arose from problems often posed but never solved by the intellectuals of the twelfth. Censura is present not only in what they said but also in how they said it. Their insistence on discipline of diction and correctness of style; their regard for carefully crafted speech; the elegance—in its etymological sense of precision—with which they employed the Latin language: these characteristics of the writing and deportment of the magistri were more than verbal niceties or esthetic embellishments. Rigorous standards, modulated with irony and imposed with malice, gave Bernard of Clairvaux reason to fear the curiositas of his learned critics.25 To criticism, dealt out and received, all of them were acutely sensitive, for the censors of litteratura were also its practitioners. They returned, in the twelfth century, to the problems of the public role of the writer unsolved by their predecessors in the eleventh. If a grammaticus as gifted in transforming the pabulum of the classroom as the author of the Ruodlieb chose to withhold his work from the international stage of Latin letters, Bernardus Silvestris, surpassing the mannerists who had written before him in the Loire, matched literary medium to philosophical message to convey, in the poetry spurned by devotees of logic, dialectic, and theology, what could be neither perceived nor expressed with their methods. Playing in verse the part of the scurra that Anselm of Besate had assumed in prose, the Archpoet showed how the personae of the sinner, the rogue, and the false penitent condemned by the reformers could be used to stand their ideology on its head. And while Alan of Lille, identifying his voice with that of the clerical establishment, demonstrated the alertness of Latin literature to the temper of the times, he also revealed its defensiveness, expressed in an urge to reconcile authority shared by generations of intellectuals after Abelard’s debacle in 1141. Uncertain in their status but vaulting in their ambition, the magistri were voluble about silence because many of their aspirations and insecurities were concentrated in that metaphor of censorship. It recurs in their thought, even when it might be construed as pointing in the direction of a less limited concept of freedom. Take, for example, the idea of the permissibility of error, which no one—from Berengar to Roscelin, Abelard, Robert of Melun, and beyond—interpreted as a license for unrestricted inquiry. Bernardus Silvestris might avoid speaking about God, but Abelard did not. In the sphere of doctrine, which the generation after his approached with circumspection, the detection of error presupposed criteria of truth. 24 See L. Bianchi, “Censure, liberté, et progrés intellectuel à l’université de Paris au xiiie siècle,” AHDLM 63 (1996), pp. 45– 93 and cf. M. McLaughlin, Intellectual Freedom and Its Limitations in the University of Paris in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York, 1977). 25 See above, p. 19.

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The ﬁrm ground of veritas, not the shifting sands of probability and verisimilitude, remained the end to be reached. To come close to it with the approximations of analogy was to run a risk. Wishing to avoid the baleful consequences, Abelard and Robert of Melun argued against blanket condemnation of mistakes. Peccant writings might still have a value; a distinction should be drawn between the work and its author. Although generally accepted in the later Middle Ages,26 this version of the permissibility of error did not answer vexed questions, the most fundamental of which was, who should determine the truth? Divided between a desire for speculation and an urge to arbitrate, twelfth-century scholarship failed to provide a convincing reply. If its hermeneutical theories acknowledged a hierarchy of authority that reached beyond itself, its impulse to exercise censorship was checked by its lack of real powers. Although it was ﬂattering to the scholars of Paris when, c. 1169, King Henry II of England proposed to submit his quarrel with Becket to their judgment, the offer was made in the expectation that the other party to the dispute would demand that it be settled in Rome.27 While academic opinion might be swayed by magistri who compared their status with that of the cherubim in heaven,28 above them the vicar of Christ held sway over the Church on earth. The loudness with which these twelfth-century masters raised the charge of intellectual heresy that became more frequent during the thirteenth should not deafen us to their reticence about the ecclesiological implications of their own claim to auctoritas. None of them produced a theology of the relationship between what Saint Thomas Aquinas would call the magisterium cathedrae pastoralis and the magisterium cathedrae magistralis.29 The elements of a solution to this problem, indicated by the practice of Peter the Venerable and by the judgments of Eugenius III, which pointed to the direction recently speciﬁed by the Instruction Donum veritatis,30 were submerged in a ﬂood of accusations that continued long after the ﬁrst waves had broken. Following 1141 26 W. Courtenay, “Inquiry and Inquisition: Academic Freedom in Medieval Universities,” Church History 58 (1989), pp. 168 – 81, esp. 180. 27 B. Smalley, The Becket Conﬂict and the Schools, (Oxford, 1973), p. 167. 28 Hierarchia Alani, ed. M.-T. d’Alverny, Alain de Lille. Textes inédits (Paris, 1965), pp. 230–31 with R. Gryson, “L’Autorité des docteurs dans l’Eglise ancienne et médiévale,” Revue théologique de Louvain 13 (1982), p. 63–72, esp. 68ff. and R. Guelluy, “La Place des théologiens dans l’Église et la société médiévales,” in Miscellanea historica in honorem A. de Meyer (Louvain, 1946), pp. 571– 89. 29 Contra impugnantes 2, Quodlibm 3 q. 4. a. 1 [9]; In IV Sent. 19, 2, 2, q. 3 col. 2 ad 4. 30 Istruzione “Donum Veritatis” sulla vocazione ecclesiale del teologo (24 May 1990), Congregazione per la dottrina della ﬁde 14 (Vatican City, 1993) and cf. Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Commentarium ofﬁciale 81. Acta Congregationum. Congregatio pro doctrina ﬁdei (Vatican City, 1989), p. 106.

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it was recognized that a bulwark was needed—that a structure had to be built which would safeguard Ecclesia from the controversies that were shaking her foundations and undermining her unity. The magistri, regarded as both pillars and subverters of the establishment, provided some of the materials. Having provoked the intervention of the hierarchy, several of them then identiﬁed with its decisions. The one position was not incompatible with the other. That solemn conformist, Alan of Lille, was as much the continuator of the enterprise undertaken by inadequate “rebels” in the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century as he was a spokesman for papal policy during the second. And Abelard, supposed victim of censorship, was an unwitting architect of its rise. Inquisitio veritatis: inquisitio haereticae pravitatis—viewed in terms of its legal and structural development, the agency or institution that emerges during the thirteenth century is distinct from the scholarly concept current in the twelfth.31 Or so it has seemed. Considered from a different perspective—that of ideas and their impact—the two phenomena display an afﬁnity. When Alan of Lille, in his De ﬁde catholica contra hereticos,32 argued that the “waxen nose of authority” should be “strengthened by reasoning,” it was a far cry from the position adopted by previous guardians of orthodoxy, who had regarded ratio as subversive of belief. The Catholic faith, argued Alan, should be defended against heresy by learned methods; and if the Waldensians attracted his special enmity, the reason was that those idiotae voicing their incompetent views on matters of doctrine did not possess the tools of the theological trade. Scholarship now stood in the front line of the ﬁght against heresy, and their alliance would soon be cemented by the foundation of the university of Toulouse.33 The errors of the unlettered, made fashionable by the study of popular religion, together with speculation about the Eastern origins of medieval heresy,34 have deﬂected attention from one inﬂuential current of Western thought on this problem. When learned evidence is examined to reconstruct the beliefs of the people, what is called the bias of clerical culture receives due mention—before plundering the sources for information that is 31 For the legal sense, see W. Trusen, “Von den Anfängen des Inquisitionsprozesses zum Verfahren der Inquisitio haereticae pravitatis,” in Die Anfänge der Inquisition, ed. Segel, pp. 39–77, esp. 40. For the distinction between institutional and individual functions, see R. Kieckhefer, “The Ofﬁce of Inquisitor and Medieval History: The Transition from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), pp. 36 – 61. 32 See above, p. 308. 33 See above, p. 61. 34 Cf. J. Russell, “Interpretations of the Origins of Medieval Heresy,” MS 25 (1963), pp. 26–54. For good recent summaries, see A. Vauchez in Histoire du christianisme 5, pp. 459ff. and M. Colish, The Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400 –1400 (New Haven, 1977), p. 245.

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elsewhere.35

scant Seldom is the positive value of intellectual “prejudices” recognized, although exclusions made by twelfth-century scholars point to changes in high culture which, with time, would menace its own members. Describing the trial at Reims in 1148 of that “ignorant peasant,” Eon de l’Etoile, and declining to dignify him by the name of heretic,36 Otto of Freising wrote with the hauteur of the Parisian schools. Incapable of rationality, disturbed or deranged, Eon failed to satisfy learned criteria of heretical analysis. But if his fantasies provoked laughter on the part of a curia that, a decade and a half later, would snicker at the solecisms of an English bishop,37 the poor idiota was not classiﬁed as demoniacal. The “beginning of the end of the world of enchantment, peopled by angels and demons,”38 was effected, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, not only by legislators, lay or clerical, but also by intellectuals who contributed more than they intended to the deﬁnition of heresy. What, then, was a heretic as deﬁned by them and their successors?39 How to discern the agent of the devil in a suspect whose declarations appeared pious and whose behavior seemed correct? There lay the nub of the matter. It was necessary to make distinctions. Distinguishing between true and feigned orthodoxy, the inquisitor, for centuries, used the same techniques.40 He began, like Anselm of Besate, with the principle of noncontradiction. In the contrast between deeds and words, in the discrepancy between being and seeming, lay motives for mistrust. The interrogator knew that the interrogated would attempt to evade his questions. Suspicion was thus conﬁrmed by “veiled or twisting speech.” Ambiguity, pointing to dissimulation, indicated the secrecy of a sect. In order to probe its species pietatis, the inquisitor had to strip away the obscurity with which the heretic hid his dark designs. An urge to clarity—to the univocality and openness at which scholastic thought aimed—drove the enquiry, for as 35

Cf. R. Manselli, Il secolo xii: religione popolare ed eresia (Rome, 1983), pp. 333 – 67. See above, p. 138. 37 See above, p. 149. 38 A. Vauchez, “Diables et hérétiques: Les Réactions de l’Église et de la société en Occident aux mouvements religieux dissidents, de la ﬁn du xe au début du xiie siècle,” in Santi e demoni nell’ alto medioevo occidentale (secoli v-xi), Settimane di studio del centro italiano sull’ alto medioevo 36,2 (Spoleto, 1989) pp. 573– 601, here 601 and A. Patschovsky, “Der Ketzer als Teufelsdiener,” in Papsttum, Kirche und Recht im Mittelalter. Festschrift für H. Fuhrmann, ed. H. Mordek (Tübingen, 1991), pp. 317– 34. 39 The question is posed, and a typology offered, by H. Grundmann’s splendid study, “Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterlicher Anschaung,” in id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze 1, pp. 313 – 27. 40 See Nicolas Eymenrich and Francisco Peña, Le Manuel des inquisiteurs, ed. L. SalaMolinas (Paris, 1973) with A. Borromeo, “A proposito del Directorium Inquisitorum di Nicolás Eymenrich e delle sue edizioni cinquecentesche,” Critica Storica 1 (1989), pp. 499 – 547. Cf. P. Godman, “Ambiguity and the Inquisitor” (forthcoming). 36

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Christ had said: Ego palam locutus sum mundo. Yet it was essential to be guarded. It would not do to argue with the accused. They were notoriously quick on the uptake. No one learned faster than the servants of the prince of darkness; no one was more nimble in spotting how a position plainly advanced could be turned, without scruple, on its head. Better, therefore, to inquire and, while inquiring, to doubt. Dubitando quippe ad inquisitionem venimus; inquirendo veritatem percipimus. . . .41 A strategy emerges. Its tactics are informed by criteria familiar to the readers of this book. From the dialectical methods of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, further developed in the Late Middle Ages; from the theory of integumentum, as formulated by hierophants of learning condemned by critics who nonetheless adapted their terms; from the debate over ambiguity and polysemy, generally viewed with deep misgivings; from the theologian’s image as an extirpator of doctrinal deviance, with the attendant controversies that led to an attempt to halt the spread of reversible arguments and establish standards of veriﬁcation—from this sound and fury, checked or tempered by jurisdiction imposed from above, evolved a link, unseverable yet unrecognized, between the Doppelgänger of the scholar-heretic and the inquisitor. Saint Paul was right. Through the bond between heresy and orthodoxy which he had forged,42 these ﬁgures, in the High Middle Ages, became doubles. Just as “dialecticians” and “antidialecticians” were one and the same person, or Peter Damian, Manegold of Lautenbach, and John of Salisbury directed their most vehement abuse against their former selves, so Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux may be viewed as warring twins. Behind the simple antitheses upon which the intellectual history of this period has been constructed, there perhaps lies a more complex and interesting reality; and the attempt to perceive it entails a recognition that, beyond and before institutions, there exists a place for ideas. The idea that traces their descent from the medieval inquisitor and scholar-heretic may not commend itself to the solemnity of modern intellectuals, but it has the advantage of emphasizing their chronological priority over, and historical distinctness from, the later and less diverting caste of professors, to whom the model of assiduous administrator, plodding pedagogue, or servile Staatsbeamte is held up by their masters. Different masters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in their ambivalent attitudes to authority, set the terms with which discussion of these issues opened. Animated, bitter, and prolonged, the debate still continues. The rest is not silence.43 41

Abelard, Sic et non, praef., ed. B. Boyer and R. McKeon (Chicago, 1976), pp. 103, 338–39. 42 See above, p. 75. 43 Cf. P. Godman, The Saint as Censor. Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (2000) and Censorship and Heresy in the Secret Archives of the Roman Inquisition (2000).

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INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

Biblical GENESIS 1:2, 276 45:26, 121 JOB 10:1, 157, 223 PSALMS 80, 71 PROVERBS 10:19, 4 ECCLESIASTES 8:17, 158 9:12, 70 SONG OF SONGS 2:15, 104 ISAIAH 7:4, 108 24:2, 228 32:17, 110 JOEL 1:5, 225 WISDOM 11:21, 98, 146 REVELATIONS 9:3, 198 10:19, 198 MATTHEW 4:19, 70 13:25, 197 18:15, 92 21:19, 187 26:18, 36 MARK 1:17, 70 LUKE 1:52, 149 18:13, 191 18:17, 72 JOHN 7:26, 71 15:4, 217

ACTS 5:29, 187 ROMANS 3:30, 30 1 CORINTHIANS 2:15, 20 8:6, 99 11:19, 88, 95 GALATIANS 1:8 – 9, 228 1 TIMOTHY 6:20, 85 1 PETER 3:15, 97 APOCALYPSE 4:5, 170 8:5, 170 14:2, 170 Classical and Medieval ABELARD, PETER Adtendite a falsis prophetis, 83 Apologia contra Bernardum, 19, 70, 92– 93, 100, 111 Carmen ad Astralabum, 85– 86 Collationes, 79– 81 “Confessio ad Heloisam,” 111 Confessio ﬁdei “universis,” 71, 111, 145 Dialectica, 66 – 67, 230, 267, 336 Epistolae, 14, 65 – 67, 84 – 85, 92 Ethica, 83 Expositio orationis dominicae “Multorum legimus orationes,” 85 Historia calamitatum, 11, 14, 66, 68 – 74, 76, 82, 85, 92, 153 Hymnarius Paracletensis, 4– 5 Regula, 3– 4 Sermones, 81– 85, 89 Sic et non, 13, 75 –76, 78, 81, 116–17, 119, 168, 193, 205, 297, 348 Soliloquium, 81– 82 Theologia christiana, 74 –79, 81– 82, 88 – 91, 114, 153

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INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

ABELARD, PETER (continued) Theologia “scholarium,” 10, 74, 78, 86 – 91, 112, 153 Theologia “Summi boni,” 11, 13, 62, 67– 70, 73–75, 77, 86 – 87 Tractatus II de categoricis, 66 ACERBUS MORENA Historia Frederici I, 193 ALAN OF LILLE Anticlaudianus, 294– 95, 301, 305, 309–14, 316–18, 320, 322–23, 343 De ﬁde Catholica contra hereticos, 296, 307–8, 346 De planctu Nature, 294, 296 – 308, 312, 318 Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum, 294, 296, 308 Explanationes in prophetis Merlini, 294 Hierarchia Alani, 345 Liber penitentialis, 223 –25 Regulae celestis iuris, 294, 296, 309 Sermo de sphaera intelligibili, 282 Sermo de trinitate, 191 Summa de arte praedicatoria, 296 Summa “Quoniam homines,” 294– 95, 300–301, 308, 313, 315 ALAN OF TEWKSBURY Vita sancti Thomae, 149– 50 ALCUIN Carmina, 36 Versus de . . . Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae, 38 ALEXANDER III, POPE Epistolae, 212, 306 AMBROSE, SAINT Epistolae, 11 ANONYMA Annales Cameracenses, 196 Asclepius, 258, 282, 288 Causa Aiacis et Ulixis, 246 De ordinando pontiﬁce, 49, 53 Epitaphium Abelardi et Heloissae, 10 Gesta Apollonii, 37– 42 Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, 37– 41 Metamorphosis Golye episcopi, 13 Regula Magistri, 3 Ruodlieb, 32–33, 35, 38, 42– 47, 59, 344 Summa institutionum, 265 “Trierer Stilübungen,” 218 –19 Waltharius, 40

ANSELM OF BESATE Rhetorimachia, 48 – 49, 51– 56 ANSELM OF CANTERBURY, SAINT De incarnatione verbi, 64– 65, 67 ARCHPOET Carmina, 191, 193, 195 – 96, 202– 3, 205 –17, 219–27 AUGUSTINE, SAINT Confessiones, 283 Contra duas epistolas Pelaganiorum libri quattuor, 11 De dialectica, 236– 37, 268, 270 De doctrina christiana, 236, 268 Retractationes, 86 BAUDRI OF BOURGEUIL Carmina, 286 BENEDICT, SAINT Regula, 3 – 4, 9, 223 BERENGAR OF POITIERS Apologia, 110–12 BERENGAR OF TOURS Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum, 63– 64 BERNARD OF CHARTRES Glosae super Platonem, 163 – 65, 176 BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX Apologia, 19 –20 De consideratione, 98, 146– 47, 336 De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, 226 –27 De laudibus Virginis Mariae, 17 Epistolae, 14–17, 91–103, 110, 119 –22, 124 Sermones, 104 – 5, 145 – 46 Vita sancti Malachiae episcopi, 147– 48 BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, 156 – 57, 232– 41, 250, 257, 271, 273 –74, 283, 285 Commentum super Martiani Capellae librum De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 232– 35, 241, 244, 271, 273, 285 Cosmographia, 232– 33, 241, 256, 258, 271–73, 277– 84, 286 – 94, 297, 300, 302, 304 – 5, 309, 313 –14, 322, 335, 338 De gemellis, 241– 42, 246 De paupere ingrato, 241– 42 Mathematicus, 184, 232, 241– 42, 244 – 71, 274, 283, 286, 289, 292, 309

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

BOETHIUS De trinitate, 126, 129, 144, 236 Philosophiae Consolatio, 55, 81, 234 – 36, 239–40, 246, 248, 258, 262, 272, 282–83 Topica Aristotelis, 182 CALCIDIUS Commentarius in Timaeum, 164, 271, 279, 290–91 CICERO De inventione, 152, 156, 231, 238, 240, 256, 267 De natura deorum, 259 De senectute, 261 Somnium Scipionis, 259, 261, 285 CLARENBALD OF ARRAS In Theodorici Carnotensis librum “De sex dierum operibus,” 275 CONRAD OF HIRSAU Dialogus super auctores, 266 DANIEL OF MORLEY Philosophia, 240– 41 DARES PHRYGIUS Historia Troyana, 41, 325 –26 DIOMEDES Ars grammatica, 164 EBERHARD OF YPRES Dialogus Ratii, 132– 33 EGBERT OF SCHÖNAU Epistola, 193 FIRMICUS MATERNUS De errore profanarum religionum, 269 Mathesis, 258, 267 FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, EMPEROR Epistola, 192 FROUMUND Carmina, 33, 35– 37, 43, 45 Epistolae, 33, 37, 41– 42 FULGENTIUS Mitologiae, 285–86 FULK OF DEUIL Epistola ad Abelardum, 72–73 GARLANDUS “COMPOTISTA” Dialectica, 283 GEOFFREY OF AUXERRE Epistola de miraculis in itinere Germanico peractis, 104

359

Libellus contra capitula Gisleberti episcopi Pictavensis, 128, 139 Sancti Bernardi vita prima, 138 GERHOCH OF REICHERSBERG De novitatibus huius temporis, 107– 9 Liber contra duas hereses, 108– 9 GERVASE OF MELKLEY Ars poetica, 323 GILBERT FOLIOT Epistolae, 150, 187– 88 GILBERT OF POITIERS Commentum in Boethii, 126 –27, 129 – 31, 133, 146 Commentum in Epistolam ad Romanos, 143 GRATIAN Decretalia, 102 Causae, 102, 246 Distinctiones, 102 GREGORY THE GREAT, POPE AND SAINT Moralia in Job, 222–23 HILARY OF ORLÉANS Carmina, 73 –74 HILDEBERT OF LAVARDIN Carmina minora, 244 – 45, 247, 251, 253, 332 De querimonia et conﬂictu carnis et spiritus seu animae, 244 HORACE Ars poetica, 264 Carmina, 92, 254 Epistolae, 160, 264 Sermones, 264 HUGH OF SAINT-VICTOR De sacramentis Christianae ﬁdei, 12, 272–75 Didascalicon, 20, 165 – 67, 171–72, 179, 234 – 35, 239 De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum, 179 Divisio philosophiae, 234 ISIDORE OF SEVILLE Etymologiae, 250 JOHN OF CORNWALL Eulogium ad Alexandrum papam tertium, 306

360

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

JOHN OF GARLAND De triumphis ecclesiae, 61 JOHN OF HAUVILLA Architrenius, 318–24, 339 JOHN OF SALISBURY Entheticus Maior, 154, 177 Epistolae, 173–75, 188 – 89, 199 –200, 221, 244 Historia Pontiﬁcalis, 124, 126 –29, 131– 35, 139, 145, 151, 162, 176, 194 – 95, 267 Metalogicon, 58, 124 –25, 127, 133, 151–63, 165–77, 180, 182– 87, 189, 314, 317, 323, 338 Policraticus, 124 –25, 174 – 90, 244, 267, 338 JUSTINIAN Digestum, 265 Institutiones, 265 Novellae, 265 JUVENAL Satirae, 23, 34, 42, 45, 248, 263, 298 LANDULF SENIOR Historia Mediolanensis, 51 MACROBIUS In “Somnium Scipionis,” 259, 262, 285, 288 Saturnalia, 175 MANEGOLD OF LAUTENBACH Liber ad Gebhardum, 58 Liber contra Wolfelmum, 57– 60 MARBOD OF RENNES Liber decem capitulorum, 44 – 45, 253 MARTIAL Carmina, 43, 45 MARTIANUS CAPELLA De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 233 – 34, 271, 273, 285 – 86, 288 MATTHEW OF VENDÔME Ars versiﬁcatoria, 314, 316 MILO OF SAINT-AMAND De sobrietate, 285 NICHOLAS I, POPE Epistola, 12 NICOLA MANIACUTA “Correctores immo corruptores,” 140– 43 NIGEL OF CANTERBURY Speculum stultorum, 320

OTTO OF FREISING / RAHEWIN Chronicon, 198– 99 Gesta Frederici, 71, 125, 136 – 38, 144, 153, 196 – 97, 217–18 OVID Amores, 257 Ars amatoria, 46, 329 – 30 Epistulae ex Ponto, 259, 329 Fasti, 248 Metamorphoses, 46, 248 – 50, 252, 257, 290, 320, 329 Tristia, 329, 332– 33 PETER DAMIAN, SAINT De divina omnipotentia, 28– 31 Epistolae, 30– 31, 49 – 52 Liber Gomorrhianus, 50 PETER OF BLOIS Carmina, 316 –17 Epistolae, 244 PETER OF CELLE Epistolae, 20–21 PETER THE CHANTER De tropis loquendi, 293 Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, 334 PETER THE VENERABLE Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam durietiem, 113 –15 Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, 112–14, 336 Contra sectam Saracenorum, 115 Epistolae, 5–11, 13 –14, 112, 115 Statuta, 4, 6, 9 Summa totius haeresis Saracenorum, 115 PETRUS HELIAS Summa super Priscianum, 234, 240 PETRUS PICTOR Carmina, 245 PHILIP OF HARVENGT De silentio clericorum, 21–24 Epistolae, 21–22 PHILIPP THE CHANCELLOR Sermones, 339 PLATO Cratylos, 262 Phaedrus, 285 Phaidon, 262 Symposium, 285 Timaeus, 77, 163 – 65, 230, 232, 258, 271, 279, 280, 284, 290

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

PLAUTUS Mercator, 46 Mostellaria, 46 PS.-OVID De Vetula, 324–33, 339 Nux, 252 PS.-QUINTILIAN Declamationes maiores, 242– 44, 246, 251, 255, 269–70 Declamationes minores, 242 QUINTILIAN Institutio oratoria, 159 – 63 REINALD OF DASSEL Epistola, 193–94, 203 ROBERT OF MELUN Sententiae, 116–19, 127, 134 ROSCELIN Epistola contra Abelardum, 66 – 67 RUPERT OF DEUTZ Commentaria in Apocalypsim, 25 Commentaria in evangelium Sancti Johannis, 24–25, 217 Commentaria in Joel, 225 –26 Commentaria in Regulam Sancti Benedicti, 25 Vita Heriberti, 204 SAXO GRAMMATICUS Gesta Danorum, 192 SENECA MAIOR Controversiae, 242 SENECA MINOR Epistolae morales, 46, 259 SERVIUS GRAMMATICUS Commentarii in Vergilium, 263 SIGEBERT OF GEMBLOUX Passio sanctorum Thebeorum, 286 STEPHEN OF TOURNAI Epistola, 341–43 TERENCE Eunuchus, 46 THIERRY OF CHARTRES Commentum super Boethii librum “de

361

trinitate,” 236, 275 –76, 280 – 81, 292 Commentum super Ciceronis librum “de inventione,” 231, 240, 256 Glosa, 281 Lectiones, 281 Prologus in Heptateuchon, 162, 231, 238 – 39 THOMAS AQUINAS, SAINT Contra impugnantes, 345 In IV Sent., 345 THOMAS OF MORIGNY Disputatio Catholicorum patrum contra dogmata Petri Abailardi, 106 VIRGIL Aeneid, 156– 57, 180 – 84, 186, 209, 233 –39, 251, 271, 273, 288 Eclogae, 249, 263 Georgica, 330 WALAHFRID STRABO, ABBOT De imagine Tetrici, 38 WALTER OF CHÂTILLON Alexandreis, 315 Carmina, 320 WALTER OF MORTAGNE Epistola ad Abelardum, 87 WALTER OF SAINT-VICTOR Contra quatuor labyrinthos Franciae, 144 – 45, 261 WIBALD OF STABLO AND CORVEY Epistola, 194 WILLIAM OF CONCHES Accessus ad Macrobium, 230 Dragmaticon, 229– 30 Glosae super Boethium, 240, 258 Glosae super Platonem, 229 – 31, 258, 280, 284 Glosae super Priscianum, 57, 234, 240 Philosophia mundi, 31, 228 –29, 276, 343 WILLIAM OF SAINT-THIERRY Epistolae, 90– 92, 228 Sancti Bernardi vita prima, 143 – 44, 148

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H

H

GENERAL INDEX

Aachen, Marienkirche in, 200 Abelard, Peter, 3–28, 60 – 62, 65 –106, 108–48, 151, 153 – 56, 158, 163, 166, 168, 170–72, 200, 222, 227–28, 230 – 31, 267, 269, 272, 283, 295 – 96, 301– 4, 334–37, 339– 40, 342– 46, 348; as abbot of Saint-Gildas, 4, 81, 85; Petrus imperfectus, 67; Petrus scholasticus, 7, 13; as reformed heretic, 5, 8 accessus ad auctores, 163, 325, 327–29, 331 Adam of Balsham (Parvipontanus), 154, 168–69, 172, 193, 267 Adrian, IV, pope. See Hadrian IV Alan of Lille, 294–318, 320, 322, 326 –27, 332, 338, 340, 343 – 44, 346 Alberic of Osti (cardinal), 103, 126 Alberic of Reims, 62, 71, 78, 89, 91, 151– 53 Alcuin, 36 Alexander III (pope), 149 – 50, 196, 202, 212–13, 215, 221, 306 –7, 335 Alexander the Great, 41, 179, 195 – 96 altercatio, 246 ambiguity, 9, 50, 55, 103, 151, 172, 183, 185–87, 190, 193, 198, 222, 236– 37, 239–41, 245, 248, 250 – 52, 254, 259, 261, 264, 266–68, 270 –71, 276, 283 – 84, 290, 293–94, 298 – 99, 310, 313, 333, 347 Ambrose, Saint, 146, 261 amour courtois, 13 Anacletus (antipope), 84, 95 Anastros (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 287 anathema, 28, 68, 294, 303, 305, 308 Andreas Capellanus, 331 Anselm da Biaggio (bishop of Lucca), 51 Anselm of Besate, 47– 59, 344, 347 Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, 62, 64 – 67, 78, 104, 146, 283 Anselm of Laon, 153 Antiochus (persona in Gesta Apollonii), 40 – 41; daughter of, 39 – 40 Aplanos (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 288 Apollonius of Tyre (persona in Gesta Apollonii), 37–41

Architrenius (persona in John of Hauvilla’s Architrenius), 318 –20, 323 Archpoet, 48, 53, 191– 96, 198, 201–27, 341, 344 Aristotle, 10, 153, 168, 170 –71, 179, 182, 193, 210, 236, 283, 300, 315 –17; Categories of, 170, 283; Periermeneias of, 170 –71; Sophistici elenchi of, 236, 315; Topics of, 172, 182; Aristotelianism, 163 Arius, 94, 99 Arles, archbishop of, 112 Arnold of Bonneval, 84 Arnold of Brescia, 7, 95, 119, 135 – 37 Arnold Qui-non-ridet (archdeacon), 125 Arnulf of Bavaria (duke), 41 Arundel, Earl of, 149 – 50 Ascelin of Rochester (bishop), 120 Astralabe (son of Abelard and Heloise), 7, 86 astrology, 243 – 44, 248, 251– 52, 267, 270 –71, 284, 286, 288 – 89, 332 Athanasius, 74 auctoritas, 14, 17, 21, 26, 58 – 59, 61, 71– 72, 75, 77, 92, 101, 110, 117, 122, 127, 129, 143, 171, 219, 263, 265 – 66, 271, 320, 327, 334, 336, 345. See also authority Augustine, Saint, 4, 11, 24 –25, 59, 67, 75 –77, 86, 88, 102, 115, 118, 127, 161, 179, 193, 210, 215, 236 – 37, 261, 267– 70, 283; Commentary on the Gospel of John of, 24; Confessions of, 283; De ordine of, 161 Augustus, new. See Frederick Barbarossa Aulus Gellius, 194 authority, 11–12, 17–21, 24, 26 –27, 51, 54, 59, 64, 66 – 67, 72, 75, 77, 78, 84, 90, 92, 100 – 102, 113, 117–21, 126 – 31, 134, 139 –46, 149, 160, 168, 180, 182, 187, 189, 193, 195, 200, 210, 215 –16, 221–22, 228 – 30, 233, 237, 239, 243, 266, 275, 289, 296, 299, 300, 303 – 8, 312, 327, 334, 336, 339, 343 – 46, 348; abused, 231; biblical, 98, 201; of the church, 340; counter-, 108; crisis of, 70; doctrinal, 3; ecclesiastical, 11, 27, 109, 112, 117, 335; of holy writ, 86; in-

364

GENERAL INDEX

authority (continued ) tellectual, 3; legal, 264 – 65; magisterial, 343; metaphysical, 292; moral, 11; papal, 12, 135, 137, 149; patristic 63, 138; rational, 308; regal, 261; singular, 78; spiritual, 3; theological, 68, 300. See also auctoritas autobiography, ﬁctive, 324– 30

129, 133, 146; Opuscula sacra of, 138; Translation of the Aristotelian Topics by, 182 Bologna, 151 Boniface I (pope), 11 Bonne-Espérance (monastery), prior of See Philip of Harvengt Byzantium, 327

Baldwin (archdeacon of Totnes), 188 Bamberg Reichstag of, 201 Bartholomew of Exeter (bishop), 174 Baudri of Bourgueil, 286, 309 Becket, Thomas, Saint, 149 – 51, 173 –78, 180–83, 185– 90, 192, 196, 204, 345; as archbishop of Canterbury, 125, 149, 174–75, 177, 180, 192, 196; as chancellor of England, 125, 174, 177, 179, 125; as subduer of Aquitaine, 177 Benedict, saint, 4, 9; Rule of, 3, 9 Benedictine Rule, 25, 207, 224 Berengar of Poitiers, 110 –12 Berengar of Tours, 62–64, 66, 69, 113, 339, 344 Bernard (abbot of Sant’ Anastasio alle Tre Fontane). See Eugenius III (pope) Bernard (not of Clairvaux), 26 Bernard of Chartres, 132– 33, 151, 153, 159, 160–69, 171, 176, 180, 185– 86, 309–11, 314, 333, 338; as sage of Chartres, 168; as senex, 152, 159 Bernard of Clairvaux, 3, 7– 8, 12–23, 28, 31, 60–62, 67, 69 – 88, 90 –106, 107– 48, 153, 166, 195, 205 – 6, 222, 226 – 28, 233, 334–36, 341– 42, 344, 348; as abbot of Clairvaux, 19; 92– 96, 101, 103, 111–12, 116, 118, 120 –25, 129 – 30, 135, 141, 144 – 46, 148; as chimaera of Clairvaux, 106 Bernardus Silvestris, 156 – 57, 183 – 86, 232–51, 253–55, 257– 59, 261, 265 – 74, 277–86, 289 – 94, 296 – 97, 300, 302–3, 305, 308 – 9, 311, 313, 326, 332, 335–36, 338 – 40, 344 Bernhard of Sachsenkam, 42 Besançon, 218; Diet of, 196, 199 “Bildungsepos,” 317–18, 323 –24 Blois, count of, 277 Boethius, 38, 55, 80, 126 –29, 133, 138, 146, 161, 234, 236 – 37, 239, 271–72, 282–83, 303, 316; De trinitate of, 126,

Caesar, C. Julius, 179 Caesar Augustus, new. See Henry III (emperor) Calcidius, 164, 271, 278, 290 Calo (archdeacon), 125 Camillus, 263 – 64 Canterbury, 154, 173, 176, 187, 189; archbishopric of, 64; see of, 173 –74, 180 Carolingian poetry, 35; writers of, 37 Carthage, 251 Cassiodorus, 161 Cathars, 104 – 5 Cato Maior, 263 – 64 Cato Uticensis, 263 Celestine II (pope). See Guido da Città del Castello Celestine III (pope), 94. See also Hyacinth Boboni censor, 27, 29, 31, 59 – 60, 91– 92, 111, 217, 269, 294, 344; intellectual, 75; monastic, 228; morum, 343. See also censura; censorship censorship, 10 –11, 26, 28, 30, 65, 131, 147, 304, 307, 340, 343, 345 – 46; development of, 27; language of, 305; metaphor of, 344; pre-censorship, 109; self-censorship, 13, 31, 131, 255; voluntary 26. See also censor; censura censura, 26, 28, 31, 228; praevia, 11, 25, 27, 65, 109, 218, 233, 271, 335; repressiva, 335. See also censor; censorship Chalcedon, council of, 102 Chalon-sur-Saône (monastery), 10 Charlemagne, 200 –201, 212–13; German (see Frederick Barbarossa) Charles the Bald (emperor), 12 Chartres, 132, 152, 176, 339; bishopric of, 176; future bishop of (see John of Salisbury); master of (see Bernard of Chartres); sage of (see Bernard of Chartres) Chrysippus, 237

GENERAL INDEX

Cicero, 48, 53, 55, 156, 193 – 94, 196, 231, 238, 240, 256, 259, 261, 267– 68, 285; Hortensius of, 268 Cincinnatus, 264 Cistercian reform, 22 Clairvaux (monastery), 8, 120–21, 139, 147; abbot of (see Bernard of Clairvaux) Clarenbald of Arras, 275 –76 Clement III (pope), 26 clergy, 7, 12, 30–31, 50 – 51, 71, 102– 3, 107, 125, 137, 139, 192– 94, 196, 198, 201–2, 207, 215, 230, 308, 323, 342; secular, 51, 113; unreformed 51. See also clerics clerics, 20, 66, 73, 76, 82, 93, 150, 175, 192, 205, 213, 222, 229, 247, 308; clerical culture, 47; clericus aulicus, 47, 49, 51, 56; learned, 173; marriage of, 50, 52; misconduct of, 53; secular, 123, 167, 223; unreformed, 206; See also clergy Clotho (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 290 Cluny (monastery), 4 –10, 14, 20, 28, 82; abbot of; aegis of (see Peter the Venerable); Cluniac reform, 8 cohaerentia artium, 272. See also concordantia artium collatio, 6, 162–64 Cologne, 104–5, 199, 202, 206, 210 –12, 221; archbishop of (see Reinald of Dassel); see of, 213 Colures (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 287 concordantia artium, 31, 133, 156, 166 – 67, 230, 232, 241, 293, 309 –10, 333, 337–39 condemnation, 8, 13, 54, 65 – 66, 69 –70, 74, 81, 94, 104, 123, 128, 131, 134, 179, 216, 228–29, 294, 305 –7, 335, 345; clerical, 35 confessio, 222–27 Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books, 25, 27, 294 Cono of Praeneste (cardinal), 70, 72 Conrad of Staufen (count-palatine), 201, 210–12 Constantinople, 327; council of, 102 Coran, translation of, 116 Corbeil (monastery), 68 Corniﬁcius (persona in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon), 133, 153, 156, 165, 323;

365

“Corniﬁcians,” 152– 53, 156, 158, 160, 163, 166, 189, 338; “Corniﬁcianism,” 152 creation, interpretation of, 273–76 Cuno I of Siegburg (abbot), 24 –25 cura corporis, 206; cutis, 224 curia, Roman, 27, 53, 62, 91, 93 – 94, 97, 107, 120 –21, 124, 126, 128 –29, 135 – 36, 138, 145 – 46, 149 – 50, 175, 212, 219, 334 – 36, 347 curiositas, 19 –20 Daniel of Morley, 240 – 41 Dares Phrygius, 41, 325 David (king and prophet), 63, 69, 87, 90, 95 – 95, 147, 195, 211 Denis, Saint, 200 descriptio pulchritudinis, 45, 320, 322 determinism, astral, 243, 256– 57 dialectic, 29, 50, 52, 54 – 55, 57, 60, 63, 66, 95, 101, 104, 109, 132, 151, 157, 162, 169, 186, 205, 239, 267– 68, 309, 339 Die, bishop of, 112 Diogenes, 82 Diomedes (grammarian), 164 disputatio, 6, 58, 99 –100, 106, 114, 297, 300 – 301, 308, 341– 43 doctrina, 22, 136 Drogo, 48– 56 dwarves, 32– 35, 310, 333 Eberhard II (abbot of Tegernsee), 42 Eberhard of Ypres, 132; Ratius of, 132 Eckhart, Master, 102 Eco, Umberto, 270 Edward the Confessor, 200 Egbert of Schönau (abbot), 193 Ellinger (abbot at Tegernsee), 47 Embrun, archbishop of, 112 Empson, W., 270 encyclopedism, 161, 332 Endelechia (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 279 – 81, 291 enkyklios paideia, 161 Eon de l’ Etoile, 138, 347 Ephesus, council of, 102 Epicurus, 185; Epicurianism, 184 Erewin, provost of Steinfeld, 105 Eriugena, Johannes Scotus, 12 Eskil of Lund (archbishop), 197

366

GENERAL INDEX

Étampes, council of, 84, 123 etymology, 250, 257– 58, 266, 269 Eugenius III (pope), 21, 93, 109, 120–31, 139–146, 232–33, 335–37, 345; Bernard of Pisa (former abbot of Sant’ Anastasio alle Tre Fontane), 121, 140, 142 Eusebius, Saint, 124 exclusus amator, 331 fabula, 30, 35, 115, 183, 242, 272–73 fallaciae, 236, 257, 260, 267 Faustus (emperor); as Manichaean 115 ﬁctio auctoris, 328, 332 Firmicus Maternus, 258, 267 forgery, 324, 332 fortuna, 244–47, 257 Frankfurt, diet of, 123 Frederick Barbarossa (emperor), 22, 191– 92, 194–203, 205, 207– 9, 213, 218 – 19, 226, 341; as German Charlemagne, 200; as new Augustus, 209 Frederick of Cologne (archbishop), 25 Freising, bishop of. See Otto of Freising Frontinus, On the Art of War of, 194 Froumund (abbot at Tegernsee), 32– 47 Fulgentius (mythographer), 186, 285 – 86 Fulk of Deuil (prior), 72–73 Gap, bishop of, 112 Garland “Compotista,” 283 Genius (persona in Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae), 305 – 6 Geoffrey of Auxerre, 128, 131, 138 Geoffrey of Chartres, 71–72, 90, 92 Geoffrey the Fair (duke of Normandy and count of Anjou), 229 Gerard Pucelle, 198 –200 Gerhoch of Reichersberg, 107– 9, 147, 306; as Bavarian Jeremiah, 109; Commentary on the Psalms of, 108; as provost of Reichersberg, 107, 109 Germain, Saint, 5, 8 Gervase of Melkley, 323 Gilbert Foliot, 149 – 50, 156, 173, 187– 89; as bishop of London, 149 – 50, 187, 189 Gilbert of Poitiers, 20, 93, 108 – 9, 120, 123–46, 151, 153, 158, 168, 176, 232– 33, 293, 303, 306, 309, 335 – 37; as bishop of Poitiers, 120, 124, 129, 133, 139, 144; as chancellor at Chartres, 125, 158

Gisors-Trie, conference of, 175 Godfrey of Admont, 108 – 9; as abbot of Weingarten, 108 Goliath, 63, 69, 87, 90, 95 – 96, 147 grammatica, 25, 29, 31– 32, 46 – 47, 56, 58, 60, 138, 152– 53, 156, 158 – 67, 186, 296 – 97, 309 –10, 338, 344 Gratian, 21, 102 Greece, ancient, 163 Gregory VII (pope), 58, 84 Gregory the Great (pope and saint), 174, 222–23 Guido (cardinal and papal legate), 119 Guido da Città del Castello (cardinal), 125. See also Celestine II (pope) Guido da Velato (archbishop), 51 Gunther of Pairis, 209; Ligurinus of, 209; Ludus de Antichristo of, 209 Hadrian IV (pope), 108 – 9, 135, 173, 175, 177, 196 – 97, 218 –19; persona of, 218 Hannibal, 182 Heinrich (pronotarius of Frederick Barbarossa), 218 Heloise, 3 –14, 114, 116; as abbess of the Paraclete, 7 Henry (count of Champagne), 22 Henry (prince), 187 Henry II (king of England), 125, 149, 173 –75, 177, 187– 88, 200, 230, 322, 345 Henry III (emperor), 41, 47– 52; as Caesar Augustus, 48, 50 Henry of France (son of Louis VI), 232 Henry “of Lausanne,” 103 Herbert of Bosham, 173, 188 Hereford, bishop of, 174 heresy, 12, 26, 47, 56 – 58, 61– 69, 71, 78, 88 – 98, 100 – 105, 107– 9, 113 –16, 122, 126, 129, 132– 34, 137– 38, 141– 42, 145, 148, 153, 158, 169, 195, 219, 233, 294 – 96, 301, 303 – 4, 307, 309, 334 – 35, 346, 348; ambivalence of, 111; deﬁnition of, 86, 347; dialectic of, 339; founders of, 104; heresiarchs, 63, 66, 103, 133, 139; hypothetical, 100; imputations of, 92; intellectual, 26, 143, 345; language of, 305; Lombard, 135; regulation of, 102 heretics, 7, 8, 10, 58, 62– 65, 69, 74 –77, 80, 87, 90, 94, 98, 101– 4, 108 – 9, 112–

GENERAL INDEX

15, 115, 117, 119, 123, 129 – 30, 135 – 36, 138, 151, 153, 158, 189, 228, 231, 294, 301, 337, 341, 347; Albigensian, 61; hounder of, 89, 307, 334; hunters of, 66, 104–5, 118; modern, 78; Nestorian, 115; philosopher, 147; reformed, 5, 8; scholar-, 348; unlettered, 105; Waldensian, 308 Heribert of Cologne (archbishop), 204 Herman of Cologne (archbishop), 50 Herman of Constance (bishop), 119 hermeneutic, 25, 64, 69, 84, 114, 117–18, 139, 142, 153, 159, 167, 169, 172, 176, 182, 185, 187, 189, 236, 239–41, 310, 336; hermeneutic control, 298; integumental, 240; of veriﬁcation, 134, 168, 197 hierarchy, 11, 14, 25–27, 65, 76, 82–83, 92, 103, 112, 118, 122, 127, 129, 137, 205, 287, 335, 346; of authority, 345; curial, 31; ecclesiastical, 61, 70, 103, 113, 136, 230, 336; of knowledge, 242, 271, 303, 338; of learning, 309; of sexual offenses, 215; of vices and virtues, 227 Hilary (bishop of Chichester), 149 – 50, 156, 187, 189 Hilary, Saint, 88, 127, 133 – 34 Hilary of Orléans, 73 Hildebert of Lavardin, 244– 47, 250 – 51, 253, 270–71, 309, 326, 332 Hildesheim, provost of. See Reinald of Dassel Hillin (archbishop of Trier), 218 Homer, 193, 210 homosexuality, 294 Horace, 89, 92, 160, 202, 263 – 64 Hucbald of Saint-Amand, 37 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 12, 20, 124, 142, 153, 165–67, 171, 179, 185 – 86, 234 – 35, 239, 272–76, 279, 283 “Huhuism,” 35–36, 42 Huizinga, J, 311–13 Humbert of Silva Candida (cardinal), 63 Hunfried (imperial chancellor of Italy), 50 Hyacinth Boboni (cardinal), 94, 96, 125, 135. See also Celestine III (pope) Hyle (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 277–79, 304 Innocent II (pope), 6 –7,13, 21, 84, 94 – 97, 99, 101–2, 130 – 31, 135, 143 – 44, 335, 342

367

Innocent III (pope), 335 inquisition, 153; Holy Roman and Universal, 25, 61; 103; inquisitors, 61– 62, 89, 94, 96, 100, 102, 110, 112, 119 –20, 127, 129 – 30, 136, 144, 303, 305, 347– 48; self-styled, 334 integumentum, 164, 230, 234, 237– 38, 240 – 41, 272–73, 284, 293, 296, 304, 310, 315, 326,; theory of, 183 – 84, 236, 238, 348. See also involucrum interpretation, 13, 18, 50, 58, 85, 115 –16, 118, 142– 43, 160, 164, 167– 69, 171– 72, 175, 185, 195, 197– 98, 207, 218, 231, 233, 238, 255, 274, 276, 285, 289, 292, 298, 310, 329; contextual, 64, 85; historical, 273; limitless, 180; literal, 273; multiple, 148; plurality of, 117; style of, 87 involucrum, 67, 69, 114, 146 – 47, 296, 342– 43; theory of, 74. See also integumentum Ireland, kingdom of, 173 Isaiah (prophet), 15, 91, 108, 110, 228 Isidore of Seville, 161, 250 Islam, 115 Ivo of Asbach (cardinal), 93 Ivo of Chartres, Decretals of, 180 Jeremiah (prophet), 15; Bavarian (see Gerhoch of Reichersberg) Jerome, Saint, 19, 75, 82– 83, 86, 89, 100, 118, 124, 141, 179, 194, 336; Epistles of, 72 Joachim of Fiore, 109 Job, 157, 222–23 Joel (prophet), 225 John (apostle), 24, 71, 93, 118, 217; Gospel of, 25, 72, 217 John of Cornwall, 306 John of Garland, 61– 62 John of Hauvilla, 318 –20, 322–24, 326 – 27 John of Salisbury, 58, 123– 43, 150 – 90, 192, 194 – 95, 167, 198 –201, 204, 227, 244, 261, 267, 301, 314, 320, 323, 335, 337– 40, 348 John the Baptist, 81– 82, 84, 145, 336 John III Vatatzes, 327 Jonas (prophet), 214 –16 Joscelin (bishop of Soissons), 137 Julian (emperor), 115

368

GENERAL INDEX

Jupiter (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 290 Justinian (emperor), 265 – 66 Juvenal, 23–24, 34, 42– 46, 263, 298, 319 laity, 12, 20, 22, 30 – 31, 66, 73, 82, 93, 102, 130, 137, 143, 148 – 49, 187, 194 – 95, 198, 201–2, 207, 214, 222, 230, 308, 337, 342; and lay affairs, 83, and lay culture, 77, 88; and lay spirituals, 83 Landulf the Elder, 51 Lanfranc of Bec, 62– 64 Lateran council, 63; third, 306 –7; fourth, 214, 307 Lawrence, Saint, 179 Lawrence of Durham, 246 Lazarus, 147 Leo (“publisher” of De vetula), 327 Leo IX (pope), 50, 52, 64 licentia docendi, 26, 307; excursandi, 304, 307; loquendi, 24 –25; scribendi, 25; tractandi, 25 Livia (empress), 324 Lothar (emperor), 197 Louis VII (king of France), 84, 176, 198, 232 Lucan, 160, 205 Lucius III (pope), 308 Luitpold of Carinthia (duke), 42 Luke (apostle), 72, 84, 149, 191 Macchiavelli, Niccolò, 27 Macrobius, 68, 77, 175, 230, 259, 272, 285, 288 magisterium, 3, 9, 10 –11, 14, 20 –21, 26, 65, 72, 79, 81, 83, 86, 122, 145, 335 – 36; cathedrae magistralis, 345; cathedrae pastoralis, 345; divine, 5; episcopal, 86, 119, 229; fraudulent, of the schools, 229; monastic, 15; moral, 304; philosophical, 4; of scholarship, 119, 229; singulare, 91–92, 94 – 95, 102, 112; universal, 30 Mainz, 52; synod of, 50 Malachy, Saint (bishop of Armagh), 147– 48 Manegold of Lautenbach, 57– 60, 348 Maniacutia, Nicola, 139 – 43, 335 Mantelgedicht, 195, 204 Marbod of Rennes, 244 – 45, 247, 250, 253, 270–71, 309

Marcel, Saint, 11; priory of, 10 Marcian (emperor), 102 Mark (apostle), 70 Martial, 43, 45 – 46; of Tegernsee (= author of the Ruodlieb), 45 Martianus Capella, 161, 233 – 34, 238, 241, 244, 271, 273, 285 – 86, 288 Martin, Saint, 5, 8, 195, 203 – 4, 210 –12, 220 –21, 232; royal abbey of, 277 Mathilda (“empress”; mother of Henry II of England), 200 Matthew (apostle), 70, 84, 92, 187 Matthew of Albano (cardinal), 26 Matthew of Vendôme, 314, 316, 322 Maurice of Sully, 307 Maximinianus, 45 Melun (monastery), 68 Mercury, 185, 238 – 39; Philology’s marriage with, 156, 161, 239 Milan, 50 – 51, 56, 199, 203 Milo of Saint-Amand, 285 misogyny, 244 – 47, 253 moderantia, 314, 316 –17, 319 –20, 322 moderni, 124, 155, 170 –71, 244, 316 –17, 327 Mohammed, 115 Montpellier, 158 Mont Sainte-Geneviève, 151, 154, 186 Moses, 276 Mundus (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 280 – 81 Natura: as persona in Alan of Lilles’s De planctu Nature, 297– 307, 312; as persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, 277–78, 287– 92; as persona in John of Hauvilla’s Architrenius, 318, 320 –21 Nestorius, 94, 115 Nicaea, 327, council of, 102 Nicholas I (pope), 12 Nicholas of Montiéramey, 96 Nigel of Canterbury, 320 Norbert of Xanten, 73 Noys (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 277– 80, 291– 92, 305 nuditas, 204 Ockham, William, 109 Ogier of Mont-Saint Éloy, 14, 17–19 “openness,” 20, 270 –71

GENERAL INDEX

Origen, 70, 75, 87, 194, 336 ornatus difﬁcilis, 292 orthodoxy, 8, 13, 20, 24, 32, 58 – 59, 64, 68, 74, 76, 84, 88, 98, 108 –10, 118, 126, 129, 131, 134, 144 – 45, 169, 193, 230, 232, 294–95, 301, 308, 338, 346 – 48; champions of, 62, 102, 195; Roman, 199, 213 Ostia, cardinal-bishop of. See Peter Damian, Saint Otto II (emperor), 41 Otto of Freising, 125, 136 – 39, 198 – 99, 217, 347 Otto of Wittelsbach, 196 Ovid, 46, 249–50, 257, 259, 271, 290, 319, 324–33; Pseudo-, 324 – 33 Oyarses (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 288 Paraclete, oratory of the, 3– 4, 68, 73 –74, 79; abbess of the (see Heloise); community of the, 74; rule of the, 13 –14 paraphrase, 241–42 Paris, 4, 13, 68, 82, 86, 99, 101, 105, 116, 120, 124 –25, 127, 132, 136, 138, 142, 150 – 52, 157, 163, 165 – 66, 173, 176, 186, 193, 197, 210, 342, 345; bishop of, 65; schools of, 6, 74, 120, 159, 167, 199, 205, 340; university of, 337– 41 Parma, 29 parricidium, 266–67 Pascal III (antipope), 202 Passau, province of, 107 Patricida (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Mathematicus), 250 – 52, 255 – 69, 289, 292 Paul (apostle), 75, 85, 88, 95, 109, 224, 228, 348 Pavia, 209, 224 Pelagius, 94; Pelagians, 11 penance, 214, 225, 334 personae, public and private, of the king, 266–68 Peter (apostle), 58, 139; church of, 202; house of, 218; see of, 212; successors of, 21; throne of, 50, 83, 122 Peter (cardinal-priest of San Crisogono), 125 Peter Damian, Saint, 28 – 31, 47– 60, 348; as cardinal-bishop of Ostia, 31

369

Peter Helias, 240 Peter Lombard, 126, 306 –7 Peter of Blois, 244, 316 –17 Peter of Bruis, 89, 90, 113; Petrobrusian heresiarch, 112; Petrobrusians, 112–14 Peter of Celle (abbot), 20 –21, 135, 174 Peter the Chanter, 293, 300, 305, 334, 338 Peter the Venerable, 4–15, 20, 112–13, 115 –16, 336, 340, 345; as abbot of Cluny, 5, 7, 11, 14, 113, 115, 336 Petrobrusians. See Peter of Bruis Petrus Pictor, 245 Philip (bishop of Bayeux), 265 Philip Augustus (king of France), 322 Philip of Harvengt, 21–25 Philip the Chancellor, 339 Physis (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 287, 291– 92 Pius V (pope), 103 Plantagenet dynasty, 322 Plato, 10, 77, 87, 117, 163 – 64, 168, 179, 230 – 31, 240, 276, 280, 285, 290, 293, 315; Timaeus, 77, 163 – 64, 230, 258, 271, 280, 284, 290 Plautus, 46 Poitiers, 125, bishop of. See Gilbert of Poitiers Pollio, C. Asinius, 263 – 64, 268 polymathy, 49, 294, 297, 327 potestas ligandi et solvendi, 334 “primitivism,” 264 Priscian, 234 “private,” 32; in private, 87; private domain, 88; private exposition, 296; private identity, 260; private part, 267; private persona, 266; private property, 110; private role, 256, 266; private sphere, 255; private study, 159 “propaganda,” 52, 101 Propertius, 224 prosimetrum, 241, 272, 297 Proteus, 63, 106, 184, 202 Providence (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 287– 88 Prudentia (persona in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus), 314, 322 Ps-Dionysius Areopagita, 12 Ps-Gelasius, 13, 75 Ps-Quintilian, 242– 44, 246 – 47, 255, 269 –71

370

GENERAL INDEX

public (adjective), 24, 50, 73 –74, 222–23, 225, 296, 308, 315, 337, 342; appeal, 74; attitude, 213; character, 83; controversies, 306; debate, 102, 194, 335; discourse, 296; discussion, 130; disgrace, 72; exposition, 87; ﬁgure, 123; image, 199; instruction, 159; interest, 178; language, 77; munus, 266; openness, 71; opinion, 110; part, 267; role, 60, 256, 259–60, 266, 344; sphere, 255; tribunal, 70; voice, 81, 185; work, 217 public (noun), 32, 72, 78, 83, 91, 102; 137; modern, 243 publicus, 73 Punic wars, 251 Pythagoras, 290 quadrivium, 157– 58, 162, 164, 235 Quincey, 73 Quintilian, 127, 159 – 63 Rahewin, 125, 196 – 97, 217–18 Ralph Niger, 26 –27, 109 Ralph of Laon, 153 rationes propriae, 293, 303 Ratius. See Eberhard of Ypres Reginfrid, Frater, 41 Reichersberg (monastery), provost of. See Gerhoch of Reichersberg Reims, 108, 129, 135, 145 – 46, 334, 347; archbishop of, 70, 101, 212; council of, 123, 126, 130, 146, 194 – 95; consistory of, 139, 143 Reinald of Dassel, 191–210, 212–21, 223 – 27, 341; as archbishop of Cologne, 22, 191–93, 195–96, 199, 201–2, 204, 207, 210–17, 221–23; as arch-chancellor 22, 191, 195, 202– 3, 208, 212, 221, 224, 227; as arch-schismatic, 22, 198 – 200, 202, 215, 222; as provost of Hildesheim, 193 – 95, 205 rhetoric, traditional, subversion of, 47– 60, 194, 243, 245, 248, 252–256 Richard Bishop, 152, 154, 159, 184 Robert of Courson (cardinal and papal legate), 340 Robert of Leicester (count), 200 Robert of Melun, 116 –19, 126 –27, 134, 139, 151–52, 154, 156, 168, 172, 174, 197, 336–37, 344 – 45

Robert Pullen, 120, 124, 151, 153, 334 – 35, 340; as archdeacon of Rochester, 120 Rochester, archdeacon of. See Robert Pullen Rome, 5, 13, 27, 73, 81, 92, 94, 96, 101– 2, 109, 120, 129 – 30, 187, 192, 198 – 99, 201–2, 212, 218 –19, 221, 227, 246, 248, 251, 255, 257, 260 – 61, 264, 275, 332, 335, 341, 343; ancient, 137, 163; bishop of, 139; classical, 326; court of, 7, 99; Roman Church, 50, 107, 120, 135, 197, 335; Roman Empire, 209; Roman satire, 45 – 46 Roncaglia, Reichstag of, 212 Roscelin, 61–68, 73, 75, 80, 86, 100, 339, 344 Rotiland, 53 – 54 Rudolf I and II (notaries in the service of Reinald of Dassel), 191 Rupert of Deutz, 24 –25, 201, 205 – 6, 208, 217, 225 –26, 342 Saint-Denis (monastery), 68 – 69, 73 –74, 77, 82 Saint-Gallen (monastery), 38 Saint-Gildas (monastery), 68, 82; abbot of (see Abelard, Peter) Saint-Marcel (monastery), 82 Saint-Médard, 13, abbey of, 72 Saint-Victor (monastery), 167; regular canons of, 165; Victorine model, 186; Victorines, 193, 222; Victorine school, 186 Salerno, 158 Sant’ Anastasio alle Tre Fontane (monastery), 120, 122, 139 Saturn (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 290 Saxo (persona in Gesta Apollonii), 38 – 39 Schiller, Friedrich, 148 schism, 95, 113, 129 – 30, 135, 195; crisis of, 21, 201; schisma, 217; schismatic, 136, 201, 218 –19. See also Reinald of Dassel scholasticus, 5, 56 Scipio (conqueror of Carthage) surrogate. See Patricida Seneca Maior, 242 Seneca Minor, 46, 179, 194, 259 Sens, 5, 8, 13, 70, 92, 96 – 97, 99, 104,

GENERAL INDEX

108 – 9, 111, 128, 153, 167, 174, 187, 189, 231; archbishop of (see William of the White Hands); council of, 94, 102 Sergius (monk), 115; as Nestorian, 115 Servius Grammaticus, 263 Sextus Pompeius, 259 Sichard of Cremona (bishop), 197 Sichelm, 48 Sidonius Apollinaris, 45, 314 Sigebert of Gembloux, 124, 286 Sigfrid (abbot at Tegernsee), 41 silentium, 3–19, 110 Silva (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 277, 279, 291– 92 Socrates, 10, 82, 164, 179 Soissons, 13, 24, 65, 69 –79, 91– 94, 108, 134, 153, 231; bishop of (see Joscelin); condemnation at, 339; council of, 7, 11, 80; lesson of, 90 solitudo, 81–84 Solomon, 4 Soranus, 179 Statius, 318 Stoics, 237; Stoic sage, 259 Stephen Langton (archbishop of Canterbury), 176 Stephen of Garland, 86, 166, 336 Stephen of Rouen, 173 Stephen of Tournai, 341– 43 Strabo (persona in Gesta Apollonii), 38 Suger of Saint-Denis (abbot), 83, 126 suicide, 243, 257, 259, 261– 62, 265 – 66, 269 Symmachus, 314 Taliarchus (persona in Gesta Apollonii), 40 Tanchelm of Utrecht, 89 tears, 319 Tegernsee (monastery), 32– 38, 41– 43, 47 Terence, 46 Thales (persona in John of Hauvilla’s Architrenius), 319 Theobald of Canterbury (archbishop), 124, 150, 173, 177, 180 Thierry of Chartres, 151, 162, 231, 233, 236, 240, 256, 265, 271–73, 275 –77, 280 – 84, 292– 93, 301, 309, 337– 40 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 345

371

Thomas of Morigny, 106 Timaeus. See Plato time, 282, 284 Toulouse, 173, 177, 185, 188, 196; university of, 61, 346 Tours, 232, 265, 339; bourgeois of, 232; council of, 173; synod of, 175 trivium, 29, 31, 47, 49, 54 – 59, 132, 156, 158, 164, 234 Udalschalk (abbot at Tegernsee), 41 Ulrich (chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa), 218 university, origins of, 337– 45 Urania (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 284 – 92 Urban II (pope), 65 Usia (persona in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia), 281, 305 Valence, region of 265 Valerius Maximus, 182 Varus, P. Alfenus, 263 – 64, 268 Vaugelas, C. Favre de, 270 Vézelay, 123 Vincent, Saint, 179 Virgil, 48, 156 – 57, 160, 179, 181– 85, 205, 233 – 34, 239, 241, 249 – 51, 257, 263, 271, 273, 283, 318, 324 Walahfrid Strabo, 38 Waldensian heretics, 308, 346 Walter of Châtillon, 315, 3120, 326 Walter of Coutances (agent of King Henry II of England), 322 Walter of Mortagne, 87 Walter of Saint-Victor, 144 – 45 Weingarten, abbot of. See Godfrey of Admont Wenrich of Trier, 58 Wibald of Stablo and Corvey (abbot), 193 – 94, 201, 203 Widger of Ravenna (archbishop), 50 William of Champeaux, 69, 153, 166 William of Conches, 31, 57, 151– 54, 156, 158 – 59, 184, 228 – 31, 234, 240, 258, 272–73, 276–77, 280, 283 – 84, 301, 309, 337, 339 – 40, 343 William of Montpellier, 307 William of Pavia, 174

372

GENERAL INDEX

William of Saint-Thierry, 13, 31, 62, 77– 78, 88, 90–92, 95, 97– 98, 112–13, 144, 148, 228, 233, 272, 280 William of Saint-Victor, 153 William of the White Hands, 26; as archbishop of Sens and Reims, 26, 101, 176 Wolfhelm, 58

Wulfric of Hazelburg, 110 Würzburg, 201 Xerxes (king of the Persians), 318 Zeno, 315