John of Salisbury and Aristotle

Charles Burnett

John of Salisbury was born in Old Sarum (the old city of Salisbury)some time between 1115 and 1120, and died in Chartres on 25 Octo-ber, 1180.1 His career was long and turbulent. After twelve years inthe schools of Paris and Chartres, he served two archbishops of Can-terbury, Theobald (1139-61) and Thomas Becket (1162-70). While inthe service of Theobald he was frequently sent on diplomatic commis-sions to the pope in Italy. After the accession of Thomas Becket to thearchbishopric (1162), he tried to steer a reconciliatory course betweenthe archbishop and the king, but before long he had to share Thomas’sexile. He returned with him to Canterbury in 1170 and was presentwhen the archbishop was slain. For the next few years he stayed inEngland, supporting the cause of Thomas’s canonization. In 1176 hewas elected bishop of Chartres, ‘in honour of Saint Thomas’, and spentthe rest of his life in the comparative calm of the cathedral.

Although he wrote letters documenting the events in which he wasinvolved throughout his life, his most productive period as an author wasin the 1150s. During these years he wrote the Policraticus (completed bySeptember, 1159; a work on ‘the trifles of courtiers and the footsteps of

1For a bibliography of works written on John of Salisbury between 1952 and 1983,and studies concerning a wide range of topics, see The World of John of Salisbury,ed. M. Wilks, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 3, Oxford, 1984. The most impor-tant publications since then are P. von Moos, Geschichite als Topik: das rhetorischeExemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die historiae im“Policraticus” Johannesvon Salisbury, and new editions of John’s works: Entheticus Maior and Minor by J.Van Laarhoven, 3 vols, Leiden, 1987, Policraticus I-IV , by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan,Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 118, Turnhout, 1993, and Metalogi-con, ed. J. B. Hall, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 98, Turnhout,1991. All the quotations from the Metalogicon in this article are according to thebooks, chapters and line numbers in Hall’s edition. I am very grateful to Barrie Hallfor helpful criticisms and for allowing me to quote from his forthcoming translationof the Metalogicon. I am also indebted to Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Christopher Ligota,David Luscombe, Constant Mews and Anna Somfai

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philosophers’), the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (a long poemon the benefit of philosophy, summarising the most useful statementsof the philosophers and commenting on contemporary morality), andthe Metalogicon (completed in October, 1159). The Policraticus andthe Metalogicon were both dedicated to Thomas Becket, and were, nodoubt, meant to complement each other. But it is the Policraticus thatwas popular in the Middle Ages (some 120 manuscripts survive), and hasreceived the most attention in recent scholarship. Of the Metalogicon,on the other hand, there are only nine manuscripts, and, aside fromits famous account of John’s schooling (Metalogicon II, ch. 10), only theaspects of the text relevant to the history of logic have received closeattention.2

This is unfair, since the work provides information about the intel-lectual activity in the second quarter of the twelfth century which isof unique importance. This is not only because, were it not for John,we would know much less about the schools of the first half of thetwelfth century. We would, for example, hardly have been aware ofthe doctrines, let alone the eminence of Bernard of Chartres,3and Johnmentions certain masters that have not yet been identified elsewhere,such as Tenredus, and Drogo of Troyes. It is also because he has strongpersonal convictions about the purpose of scholarship, and thus he castslight on the trends of scholarship in his time.

The dramatic framework for the Metalogicon is provided by his criti-cism of the followers of ‘Cornificius’, a fictitious straw man, which set hisown convictions into relief. What is criticized is the seeking of shortcutsand quick returns, study only for the sake of material gain (especiallyin law and medicine), narrow specialisation, and disdain for the worksof Aristotle. These criticisms are all related to each other, and all re-turn to the one focus: the advantage of studying Aristotle.4 It is not

2Among the studies on the logic in the Metalogicon are K. Prantl, Geschichteder Logik im Abendlande, 2nd ed., 2 vols, Leipzig, 1855-60, I, pp. 233-60, RyszardPalacz, ‘Bezposrednia recepcja Arystotelizmu wMetalogiconie Jana z Salisbury’(‘TheDirect Reception of Aristotelism in the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury’), StudiaMediewistyczne, 5, 1964, pp. 191-251 (in Polish with a French summary), and B. P.Hendley, ‘John of Salisbury and the Problem of Universals’, Journal of the Historyof Philosophy, 8, 1970, pp. 289-302.

3Only recently has John’s summary of Bernard’s teaching on forms been confirmedby Paul Dutton’s discovery of the latter’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Bernardof Chartres, Glosae super Platonem, Toronto, 1991.

4For the praise of Aristotle, cf.Met. II, 16, title: ‘quod omnes alii professores huius

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 21

that John is an ‘Aristotelian’: he finds fault with Aristotle, not onlyon account of his style, but also because of certain aspects of his doc-trine,5and he prefers to call himself an ‘Academic’.6 But Aristotle is theprime example of a scholar who did not specialize in one subject, butwrote on the whole of science.7 His works are not manuals for becomingrich and famous quick, but are the most appropriate works for use inteaching of the best kind. The major part of the Metalogicon, therefore,is devoted to a detailed analysis of the contents of Aristotle’s works, asJohn knew them, in order to counter the Cornificians’ claim that theyare useless. The Aristotle John knows best is the author of texts onlogic, and logic is the focus of the Metalogicon, as is already obvious inthe title.8 But the title also implies that John is looking beyond logic(just as ‘Metaphysica’ looks beyond physics), and the implication is thatAristotle’s method is relevant in the study of any science. The Parisianscholars used Aristotle’s works as a starting point for detailed commen-taries; John propounds an alternative way of teaching these works. Inhis criticisms, he is sometimes seen as reactionary and conservative. Heshould rather be seen as prefiguring the scholastic development of thethirteenth century in which Aristotle’s works formed the backbone ofteaching in the Arts Faculties. This is because he is not advocatingAristotelian logic as such, but rather perceives Aristotle’s method of ex-position as being the best way to train in any discipline,9hence openingup the possibility of using hitherto unknown parts of the Aristoteliancorpus, in natural science, ethics and metaphysics.

The big question in Medieval Western philosophy is ‘Why Aristo-tle?’ The Peripatetic School was only one of several schools in ClassicalAntiquity, and the Romans had embraced Stoicism with greater enthu-

[ = dialectica] Aristotili cedunt’ (‘That all other professors of this art yield pride ofplace to Aristotle’).

5Met. II, 20, 523-5: ‘ei qui Peripateticorum libros aggreditur, magis Aristotilissententia sequenda est. Forte non quia verior, sed plane quia his disciplinis magisaccommoda est’ (‘but one who embarks on the books of the Peripatetics must ratherfollow the view of Aristotle, perhaps not because it is more true, but simply becauseit is more suited to these disciplines’).

6Met. III, prol., 68: ‘Academicus sum’. For John’s sympathy with the NewAcademy of Cicero see E. Jeauneau, ‘Jean de Salisbury et la lecture des philosophes’,in The World of John of Salisbury (n. 1 above), pp. 77-125, at pp. 93-4.

7Met. IV, 1: Aristotle aims at completeness.8Met. prol., 61-2: ‘Et quia logicae suscepit patrocinium metalogicon inscriptus est

liber’ (‘As it has undertaken the defence of logic, my book is entitled Metalogicon’).9Met. III, 8: Aristotle’s speciality is in providing for subtely of discourse.

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siasm than Aristotelianism. Only in the schools of Alexandria in thelate Hellenistic period did Aristotle become the centre of philosophicalstudy, and this resulted in the adoption of Aristotle’s works as theircanon by Arabic scholars who studied philosophy.10 Then, in the earlytwelfth century, certain Greeks in the court of the Comneni in Con-stantinople were also reviving Aristotelian studies.11 These Arabic andGreek interests provided the opportunity for Western scholars to becomeacquainted with Aristotle. But Aristotle was not an obvious choice.

Before John of Salisbury, Cicero and Seneca were the ‘Philosophers’,and Plato was honoured as much as Aristotle, if not more so.12 Only inlogic was Aristotle regarded as the leader, and had been championed assuch by Gerbert d’Aurillac and Peter Abelard. But the earliest trans-lations from both Greek and Arabic in the field of natural philosophywere of works by the Neoplatonist Nemesius of Emesa and by the Ara-bic philosophers Qust.a ibn Luqa and the anonymous author of the Deortu scientiarum, not of works by Aristotle. Latin natural and moralphilosophy in the Middle Ages could have been based on the writings ofthe Church Fathers which the Greeks had preserved and cultivated, oron the most popular philosophical tradition among the Arabs and Jews:that of Avicenna. Yet from the 1140s onwards a systematic attemptwas made to translate the authentic works of Aristotle. The initiatorswere, for the most part, Italian. On the one hand, Gerard of Cremonatravelled to Toledo where he inaugurated a series of translations of Aris-totle’s works on natural science (in addition to the Posterior Analytics)which was completed by his successors, Alfred of Shareshill and MichaelScot.13 On the other hand, James of Venice, Burgundio of Pisa and Hen-ricus Aristippus between them translated a large part of the Aristotelian

10F. E. Peters overstated the lack of central importance for Aristotle among theancient Greeks, in claiming that Arabic scholars falsely believed that an Alexan-drian list of Aristotle’s works was the blueprint for a curriculum which never, in fact,existed; see History of Islamic Philosophy, eds. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Lea-man, Routledge History of World Philosophies, vol. I, 2 vols, London and New York,1996, p. 47.

11See R. Browning, ‘An Unpublished Funeral Oration on Anna Comnena’, in Aris-totle Transformed, ed. R. Sorabji, London, 1990 pp. 393-406.

12For Adelard of Bath writing early in the twelfth century, Plato was the‘philosophorum princeps’ in De eodem et diverso (Adelard of Bath, Conversationswith His Nephew, ed. and trans. C. Burnett et al., Cambridge, 1998, p. 3).

13See Burnett, The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme inToledo in the Twelfth Century, Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte,Preprint 78, 1997.

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 23

corpus directly from Greek. James and Burgundio were together in thePisan quarter of Constantinople in 1136, at the start of Burgundio’s ca-reer, which unfolded largely in Pisa itself, where he was a judge (oftenacting on behalf of the Papal Curia), until his death in 1193.14 Jamesprobably stayed in Constantinople, and Henricus was working in Sicily.The three translators must have cooperated with each other: there is noduplication of translation, and, in one case, a translation of De genera-tione et corruptione by Burgundio is erroneously attributed to Henricus.Burgundio was probably the leading figure in this group.

John of Salisbury was aware of the work of the first two of theseGreek-Latin translators, and possibly of the third. He mentions ‘Bur-gundio Pisanus’ as his authority for the statement that Aristotle meritsthe name ‘Philosophus’ rather than any other philosopher;15what be-came a commonplace afterwards is innovatory for the time.16 James ofVenice is not mentioned by John by name in the Metalogicon, but Johnis the earliest writer to quote his translation of Aristotle’s Posterior An-alytics,17and possibly the Physics,18 and he also advocated the study of

14To the classic monograph by P. Classen, Burgundio von Pisa, Sitzungsberichte derHeidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phi.-hist. Klasse, 1974. 4, Heidelberg,1974, should be added the article by G. Vuillemin-Diem and M. Rashed, ‘Burgundiode Pise et ses manuscrits grecs d’Aristote: Laur. 87. 7. et Laur. 81. 18’, Recherchesde theologie et philosophie medievales, 64, 1997, pp. 136-97.

15Met. IV, 7, 6-8: ‘Ideo enim ut aiunt, in ipso nomen philosophi sedit. Si mihi noncreditur, audiatur vel Burgundio Pisanus, a quo istud accepi’ (‘Therefore, as theysay, on him [Aristotle] the name of ”Philosopher” settles. If you don’t believe me,listen to Burgundio of Pisa, from whom I got this’).

16Note that in Policraticus, I, 6, ed. Keats-Rohan, p. 47, John is still consideringPlato as the prince of philosophers: ‘Totius etenim philosophiae princeps Plato (sitamen Aristotilici acquiescunt)’ (‘. . .For Plato, the prince of the whole of philosophy(if only Aristotelians agree)’; a similar title (‘philosophorum princeps’) reappears inPolicraticus, VII. 6. 2, ed. C. J. J. Webb, II, p. 111, lines 23-4: see Jeauneau, ‘Jean deSalisbury’, p. 89). Burgundio’s assessment of Aristotle is shared by a contemporaryanonymous South Italian writer, the author of Tractatus compendiosus, MS Vat.,Barb. lat. 283, fol. 64r (quoted by P. Morpurgo, L’idea di natura nell’Italia Nor-mannosveva, Bologna, 1993, p. 95): ‘quidam veritatem sequentes, ut Aristotiles. . . ’(‘certain people who follow the truth, like Aristotle. . . ’). This text on the elementsand the cosmos was dedicated to Robert of Selby, the chancellor of King Roger II ofSicily, and John’s close friend.

17E.g., Met. IV, 8, 36-40 = Post. Anal. I, 18, 91b1-9, Met. IV, 20, 33-4 = Post.Anal. II, 19, 100a9-10 etc. Other examples are given in Palacz (n. 2 above), pp.219-21.

18Aristotle is cited (without mention of the title of the Physics) in Met. IV, 11,16: ‘Quod Aristotiles docens, dicit ex eo contingere lactentes omnes viros putare

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the Topics, in whose revival James had taken an active part.19 John is,therefore, a rare witness to what probably marks the entry of James’stranslations and revisions into the Ile de France.

The earliest direct evidence for the knowledge of James’s translationsis an entry that Robert of Torigni, abbot of Mont Saint-Michel from 1154until 1186, added to his Chronicle between 1157 and 1169, which men-tions that James of Venice translated and ‘commentatus est’ (i.e., per-haps ‘revised’) several of the texts of the Logica nova, including theTopics. Now, Robert was at that time a neighbour and close friend ofthe archdeacon of Coutances, Richard L’Eveque, whom John of Salis-bury mentions twice in the Metalogicon: first as a student of Bernard ofChartres (I, 24, 118-9) and, the second time, in most glowing terms,

patres, feminas autem matres’ (‘In his proof of this point Aristotle observes thatbabies regard all adult males as fathers and all adult females as mothers’ = Physics,184b12-13). It is likely, however, that John is quoting at second hand, as he is in (1)Met. II, 20, 416-8 (‘Sed plerumque quae naturaliter priora sunt, et notiora simpliciter,ignotiora sunt nobis’; ‘For the most part, however, things which are by nature priorand simply better known are less well known to us’) and Met. IV, 8, 14-17 (‘Refertautem in his quae nota sunt, an natura, an ad nos notiora sint. Nam proxima sensuinotiora nobis, remotiora vero utpote universalia simpliciter, et naturaliter notiora’;‘In the matter of things known it is of consequence whether they are better knownby nature or with respect to us, things closest to the senses being better knownto us, whereas things more remote from the senses, that is universals, are simplyand naturally better known’), which, while recalling Physics 184a19-21, come fromPosterior Analytics, 71b, and (2) Met. IV, 34, 31-3 (‘Aristotiles autem eas non nihilesse asserit, eo quod non modo privant, sed ad se quodam modo subiecta disponunt’;‘Aristotle, however, asserts that they [i.e., privations] are something, since they notonly deprive but also indefinably dispose the subject things towards themselves’)which comes from Boethius, De divisione, PL 64, 883.

19The Topics had been translated by Boethius, but this translation fell into disuse;the earliest indications of its recovery are in its being quoted in the Metalogiconand by the shadowy figure Gerlandus, and in its being copied in the Heptateuchonof Thierry of Chartres and MS Oxford, Trinity College, 47 (both MSS of the early1140s). It is possible that James is the unnamed scholar whom John credits withthe recovery of the Topics in Met. III, 5, 29-34: ‘Cum itaque tam evidens sit utilitastopicorum, miror quare cum aliis a maioribus tam diu intermissus sit Aristotilis liber,ut omnino aut fere in desuetudinem abierit, quando aetate nostra diligentis ingeniipulsante studio quasi a morte vel a somno excitatus est, ut revocaret errantes, etviam veritatis quaerentibus aperiret’ (‘So then, since the utility of the Topics is somanifest, I wonder why that book of Aristotle, along with others, was neglected byour ancestors for so long as to pass completely, or almost completely, into desuetude,whereas in our own time, at the impulse of a mind diligent in study, it has beenraised up from death, so to say, or at least aroused from slumber, to call back thewanderers and open up the path of truth to those seeking it’).

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 25

as his own teacher (II, 10, 45-51). In 1167 John of Salisbury askedRichard l’Eveque for copies of Aristotle’s works that he had in his pos-session. Richard l’Eveque had taught John in Paris but was archdeaconof Coutances from 1163 to 1170,20and bishop of Avranches from 1170until his death in 1181. He was a neighbour and friend of the abbot ofMont Saint-Michel, so he could have been responsible for bringing copiesof the ‘new Aristotle’ from Paris to Mont Saint-Michel.21 John did nothave a very high opinion of the translation of the Posterior Analyticsby James of Venice, and quotes from a nova translatio. This has beenidentified as a translation surviving in only two manuscripts,22composedby a certain ‘John’. Minio-Paluello, the editor of this translation, sug-gested that John of York, the friend of John of Salisbury who accom-panied him to Apulia, was the translator, on the grounds that John ofSalisbury calls him an expert in three languages.23 Edouard Jeauneau

20There is some confusion in the sources here, since John states that Richard isalready archdeacon of Coutance when he is writing the Metalogicon (i.e., in 1159):see Met. I, 24, 119.

21The story outlined in this paragraph is told by F. Bossier and J. Brams in theintroduction to their edition of the Physica, translatio vetus (Aristoteles Latinus,VII. 1, Leiden, 1990, pp. xxi-xxiii). They base their conclusions on the research ofMinio-Paluello, but end with the suggestion that Richard L’Eveque had passed hismanuscripts to his friend Robert of Torigni. This suggestion also occurs in the thor-ough study of the manuscripts of Aristotle’s works from Mont Saint-Michel of Colo-man Viola, S. J.: ‘Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel’, in Millenaire monastique du MontSaint-Michel, 2: Vie Montoise et rayonnement intellectuel du Mont Saint-Michel, ed.R. Foreville, Paris, 1967, pp. 289-312; see also M.-T. d’Alverny, ‘Les nouveaux ap-ports dans les domaines de la science et de la pensees au temps de Philippe Auguste:La philosophie’, in La France de Philippe Auguste, Colloques CNRS, Paris, 1982, pp.863-80 (870-3).

22In fact, one complete copy, and a set of 150 glosses in the margin of a copy ofanother translation. The translator ‘John’ ’s preface is edited in Analytica Posteriora,ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B. G. Dod, Aristoteles latinus IV. 1, Bruges and Paris,1968, p. xliv. This preface includes a criticism of James’s translation: ‘Translationemvero Iacobi obscuritatis tenebris involvi silentio suo perhibent Francie magistri qui,quamvis illam translationem et commentarios ab eodem Iacobo translatos habeant,tamen notitiam illius libri non audent profiteri. Eapropter, si quid utilitatis ex meatranslatione sibi noverit latinitas provenire, postulationi vestre debebit imputare’(‘The masters of France say, by their silence, that the translation of James is wrappedin the darkness of obscurity—those masters, who, although they have that translationand commentaries translated by the same James, nevertheless do not dare to claimknowledge of that book. For that reason, if Latinity knows that any usefulness willcome to it from my translation, it ought to impute that to your command’).

23Analytica Posteriora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello (n. 17 above), p. xlvi; Policraticus,II, p. 271 ‘trium linguarum’.

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has recently proposed another John: John the Saracen, who made anew translation of the works of Dionysios the Areopagite for John ofSalisbury.24 The motives behind making a new translation given bythe translators of the Posterior Analytics and the Pseudo-Denys arestrikingly similar and correspondences in translation-vocabulary makethe identification plausible. Jeauneau hypothesizes further that the twoJohns met in Magna Graecia, and that John the Saracen might havebeen the ‘Graecus interpres noster’ whom John mentions in his Meta-logicon.25 The latter boasts that he crossed the Alps ten times, usuallyon visits to the Papal Curia, and twice visited Calabria. He laments thefact that his teachers did not know Greek (Letter 194 ), and would haveagreed with Adelard of Bath that one should travel in search of masters,‘For what French studies are ignorant of, those across the Alps will un-lock; what you will not learn amongst the Latins, eloquent Greece willteach you’.26 John discussed logical problems with a Greek master inCalabria,27and perhaps met Henricus Aristippus on a visit to Sicily: for

24Jeauneau, ‘Jean de Salisbury’ (n. 6 above), pp. 103-8.25John the Saracen states that ‘in partibus illis Graeciae in quibus fui’ (‘. . . in those

parts of Greece in which I was’; preface to Theologia mystica); ‘Sarracen’is attestedas a surname in Anna Comnena, Alexiad, V, v. 1 and XIII, v. 2, ed. B. Leib, Paris,1937-45, II, p. 22, line 22 and III, p. 104, lines 22-3. For John’s references to his Greekinterpreter see Met. I, 15, 90-91: ‘quod a Graeco interprete et qui Latinam linguamcommode noverat, dum in Apulia morarer accepi’ (‘. . .what I learned during a stayin Apulia from a Greek translator who knew Latin pretty well’); Met. I, 15, 134-5: ‘Sed nunc Graeci interpretis nostri procedat explanatio’ (‘But now should followthe explanation of our Greek interpreter’); and Met. IV, 2, 10: ‘interpres meus’.A ‘Johannes Saracenus’ participated in the translation of the Practica Pantegni ofal-Majusi in 1114/5; he was with the Pisans: see Rencontres de cultures dans laphilosophie medievale, ed. J. Hamesse and M. Fattori, Louvain-la-Neuve and Cassino,1990, Plate VII.

26‘Quod enim Gallica studia nesciunt, Transalpina reserabunt; quod apud Latinosnon addisces, Grecia facunda docebit’; Adelard of Bath, De eodem et diverso (n.12 above), pp. 68-70. Alfano,archbishop of Salerno had expressed a similar senti-ment at the end of the eleventh century in the preface to his translation of Neme-sius’s Premnon phisicon: ‘ad doctrinam huiusmodi copiosius a perpluribus dicta auc-toribus, et praecipue ab his quos mater educavit Graecia, Latinorum cogente penuria,. . . transferenda conferam’ (‘for the teaching of this kind I will devote myself to trans-lating what is said more fully by many authors, and especially those whom motherGreece educated, whilst the Latins were oppressed by lack [of knowledge]’).

27Met. III, 5, 36-42: ‘Satis enim inter cetera quae translationis artissima lege, aGraecis tracta sunt planus est, ita tamen ut facile sit auctoris sui stilum agnoscere,et ab his dumtaxat fideliter intelligatur, qui sequuntur indifferentiae rationem, sinequa nemo unquam nec apud nos nec apud Graecos, sicut Graecus interpres natione

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 27

he stayed with his good friend Robert of Selby, whom Haskins identifiedas the ‘Roboratus’ in the dedication of Henricus’ translation of Plato’sPhaedo.28

John was, therefore, right at the centre of the Greek-Latin translat-ing movement. One of his reasons for travelling to the Greek-speakingparts of Italy may have been to find Greek texts and translators, and hehimself commissioned translations from John the Saracen.29 John mayhimself have been partly responsible for bringing the new Greek-Latintranslations north of the Alps. In the Metalogicon he keeps returningto problems of translation. This is not only manifest in his citation ofalternative translations, and the questions he puts to a Greek speaker,but also, at a higher level, in his concern about the comparative impor-tance of words and the things signified by words. This does not meanhe advocated learning Greek, as Roger Bacon did one hundred yearslater. John saw no necessity to read Aristotle’s works in their origi-nal language. But a translation had implications of its own. Aristotle’swords in Latin cannot have absolute authority, and therefore the scholarshould attend only to the res. Aristotle’s works need explanation of thesubject-matter, not word for word commentary, which was becomingthe tendency among certain logicians in Paris.

Severitanus dicere consueverat, Aristotilem intellexit’ (‘For, compared with otherbooks taken from the Greeks in accordance with very narrow rules of translation, itis quite straightforward; with the qualification, however, that it is easy to recognisethe style of its author, and that it is properly understood only by those who followthe principle of indifference, without which, as the Severitan translator from theGreek was wont to say, no one among us or among the Greeks has ever understoodAristotle’).

28See Christopher Brooke, ‘John of Salisbury and His World’, in The World of Johnof Salisbury, pp. 1-21, at p. 10. For the dedication of the Tractatus compendiosus toRobert, see n. 16 above.

29John of Salisbury’s knowledge of Salernitan medicine may also be associated withhis sojourn in the South of Italy; cf. his advocacy of Nemesius’s Premnon phisiconas a useful work for obtaining knowledge of the soul (Met. IV, 29, 43-4), and hisreference to ‘Galen in Tegni’ in Met. II, 20, 162-6: ‘Simile est quod Galienus in tegnimedicinam dicit scientiam sanorum, aegrorum, et neutrorum. Non inquit omnium,quoniam hoc infinitum, non quorundam, quoniam hoc ad artem imperfectum, sedpotius qualium quorum’ (‘What Galen says in his Techne, to the effect that medicineis the knowledge of what is healthy, what diseased, and what the neutral state, isanalogous. It is not, he says, the knowledge of all cases, since this would be an endlessbusiness, nor of certain cases, since this, in terms of the science, would be imperfect,but rather of exemplary cases’). John’s awareness of medical learning is witnessedby his use of the metaphor of the medical ‘spiritus’ in Met. II, 11.

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In another respect, too, John of Salisbury’s philosophy of educationbelongs not to the schools of Paris but to the milieu of the translators:30

his education is that of the members of the curia (whether of churchmenor of nobles) and not of the classroom. Both Burgundio and John areconnected with the Papal Curia. The context of John’s philosophy ofeducation, therefore, should not be seen, as it has often been, as thenascent university of Paris, but rather as the world of the popes’ andbishops’ curiae in which the translators moved, and the households ofthe nobility to which William of Conches escaped, and in which Ade-lard of Bath functioned. John was against the narrow specialisation ofthe university. He praised Richard l’Eveque and Thierry of Chartresfor their all-round knowledge,31and emphasised the interdependence ofall the arts.32 In this the Metalogicon would seem to be a successorto Adelard’s De eodem et diverso. Both belong to the tradition ofthe Protrepticon—the exhortation to turn to philosophy in its broad-est sense—and emphasize the moral values of education. Both describethe subject-matter of the arts and the contents of the primary textbooksin them (though John concentrates on the trivium). For both, many ofthe arguments hinge on the difference between ‘res’ and ‘verba’. Bothspice their text by setting up an opposition between two parties: in theDe eodem et diverso, Philocosmia and Philosophia, in the Metalogicon,Cornificius and the Academic author himself. Philocosmia is attendedby her maidens riches, power, honour, fame and pleasure; Cornificiusadvocates a false quadrivium of riches, beauty, power etc.33 For both,

30This milieu is explored, especially in respect of English scholars, in Burnett,The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England, London, 1997, chapter 2: ‘TheEducation of Henry II’.

31Richard: Met. II, 10, 46-7: ‘nullius disciplinae expertem’ (‘. . . a man of wellnigh universal expertise’); Thierry: Met. I, 5, 10-11 ‘viri amatores litterarum ut-pote magister Theodoricus artium studiosissimus investigator’ (‘. . . lovers of learningalso. . .master Thierry, for instance, that most dedicated student of the arts’). Bothscholars were associated with the ‘New Learning’: Richard knew some ‘inaudita’concerning the quadrivium (Met. II, 10, 50: ‘inaudita quaedam ad quadruvium per-tinentia’; ‘. . . various matters relating to the quadrivium which had not been heardbefore. . . ’), Thierry received the dedication of a translation from Arabic and in-corporated other Arabic-Latin translations into his Heptateuchon; see Burnett, ‘Lareception des mathematiques,de l’astronomie et de l’astrologie arabes a Chartres’,inAristote,l’Ecole de Chartres et la Cathedrale, Actes du Colloque des 5 et 6 juillet 1997,Association de Amis du Centre Medieval Europeen de Chartres, 1997, pp. 101-7.

32E.g., in Met. II, 9.33Met. I, 4, 76-9: ‘Et genus et formam regina Pecunia donat, et bene nummatum

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 29

the essential thing is for the soul or mind to know itself, and not toaccumulate information for its own sake. Both are disdainful of sophistry,and comment on the power of eloquence, even when not backed up byknowledge.34

No direct quotation of Adelard’s De eodem et diverso, or of any ofhis other works, has been recognized in John’s works. However, theybelong to the same intellectual milieu. Adelard’s writings first circulatedin Normandy (the abbeys of Bec and Mont Saint-Michel), in the samemanuscripts as the earliest copies of the Greek-Latin Aristotle. Thebest text of the rediscovered Topics, translated by Boethius, which Johnmakes so much of, is in a manuscript which contains the earliest copiesof Adelard’s translations of Euclid.35 Both John and Adelard preferglosses and explanations to fully-fledged commentaries.

The common intellectual attitudes of Adelard and John could also beseen as belonging to an ‘English’ tradition. John is clearly proud of theachievements of English scholars, referring to ‘Baeda noster’ (I, 19, 38-9), ‘noster ille Anglus Peripateticus Adam’ (his closest friend among theParisian scholars, though not beyond criticism), Robert of Melun,36and

decorat Suadela Venusque. Hoc autem quasi quadruvio sibi utique necessario evade-bant illi repentini philosophi’ (‘. . .money is queen and grants rank and beauty, andthe rich man is adorned with persuasion and love. It was from this quadrivium, asone might call it, a course which they found indispensable, that there emerged thoseovernight philosophers. . . ’).

34Met. I, 7, 40-42: ‘Qui sunt qui opibus pollent, qui sunt qui praevalent viribus,et in omnibus negotiis optinent, nisi eloquentes?’ (‘. . . those who enjoy the powerof wealth, those who prevail in strength and are successful in every enterprise—who are they? They are the eloquent’); cf. Adelard, De eodem et diverso (n. 12above), p. 40: ‘Hac nempe quicumque munitus fuerit, et amicis iocundus et inimicismetuendus erit, utpote que non solum in philosopho spectabilis est, verum etiam interlitterarum prophanos is sepissime magis consulitur qui maiori quadam verbositate preceteris facundus videtur. Inde fit ut in quampluribus curiis rustici loquaces tacitisphilosophis preferantur’ (‘Obviously, whoever is armed with this art should be bothloved by his friends and feared by his enemies, in that not only is rhetoric respected ina philosopher, but also, among those ignorant of letters, time and again the advice ofone who seems to be more eloquent than the others is the more sought after becauseof his greater command of language. Hence it happens that in most curiae eloquentchurls are preferred to silent philosophers’).

35MS Oxford, Trinity College 47; see n. 19 above. Palacz (n. 2 above) points outthe similarities between the wording of John’s citations of Aristotle’s logical textsand that of the copies in Thierry of Chartres’ Heptateuchon.

36Met. II, 10, 14-15: ‘ut cognomine designetur quod meruit in scolarum regimine,natione siquidem Angligena est’ (‘. . . to give him the name he has won as a teacherin the schools, for by birth he is an Englishman’).

30 Charles Burnett

his good friend the English Pope Adrian IV (IV, 42). His spirit is that ofAdelard and his imitator Daniel of Morley, both of whom disparage thelogic-chopping and the passion for minutiae of the Parisian masters.37

But there are important differences between John and Adelard. ForJohn, the discussion of ‘res’ and ‘verba’ leads him to talk about theoriesof translation and the status of the texts of auctores; for Adelard theverba themselves lead to understanding the res.38 For John the marriageof philology and Mercury ( = philosophy)—the oft repeated allegory ofMartianus Capella—is the marriage of the arts of logic and ‘real life’;for Adelard it is the necessary wedding of the trivium and quadrivium.Adelard is intent on proving the reconcilability of Plato and Aristo-tle, and develops a theory of universals to show how Aristotle’s genera,species and individuals can describe the same reality as Plato’s formsand matter. John refuses to reconcile the two philosophers and criti-cizes a theory of universals of Walter of Mortagne which is very similarto Adelard’s theory.39 Finally, Adelard’s favorite philosopher remains

37For Daniel of Morley, see Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning (n. 29above), pp. 61-8.

38cf. Met. I, 6, 30-32: ‘Postremo quid est eloquentiae cum philosophia? Alteraenim consistit in verbo, altera sapientiae vias affectat. . . ’ (‘Finally, eloquence hasnothing whatever to do with philosophy. For the former is confined to words, whilethe latter desires. . . the paths of wisdom’); ibid., lines 35-6: ‘Res enim philosophia,aut finis eius quae est sapientia quaerit non verba’ (‘For it is not words but objectsthat are sought by philosophy, or rather by the end of philosophy, which is wisdom’).For a summary of Adelard’s argument see Burnett, ‘Adelard of Bath’s Doctrine onUniversals and the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius’, Didascalia, 1, Sendai, 1995,pp. 1-14.

39Met. II, 17, 43-60. There might be an implied criticism of Adelard’s use of theSalernitan question literature and his ‘wandering’, in John’s argument against seek-ing information for its own sake and at the neglect of one’s soul, inMet. IV, 40, 38-44:‘Quid autem prodest homini elementorum, aut elementatorum nosse naturam, mag-nitudinis et multitudinis proportiones doctrinaliter quaerere, virtutum vitiorumquespeculari conflictum, complexiones attendere rationum et de omnibus probabiliterdisputare, et sui ipsius esse ignarum? Nonne stultus reputabitur qui aliena lustrathospitia, et quo sibi in necessitate divertendum sit obliviscitur?’ (‘But of what availis it for a man to know the nature of the elements or their compounds [i.e., physics],to investigate scientifically the proportions of magnitude and multitude [i.e., math-ematics], to contemplate the conflict of the virtues and the vices [i.e., ethics], topay close attention to the complexities of reasoning and to debate all questions withprobability [i.e., question literature], and yet to be ignorant of himself? Will not thatman be thought a fool, who moves from one alien lodging to another, and forgetswhere he should seek shelter in time of necessity?’). But Adelard himself changesthe Salernitan question literature significantly by turning the emphasis to questions

John of Salisbury and Aristotle 31

Plato,40whereas, as we have seen, John advocates the new Aristotle.

One might expect John to be more sympathetic towards Peter Abe-lard whose teaching he followed and whom he described as the onlyperson who could have had a conversation with Aristotle.41 In the lastchapters of the Metalogicon, however, there is a thinly veiled criticismof Abelard’s approach, in John’s complete rejection of the uses of thetools of logic to explore religious questions such as the Trinity. For, asan Academic, John cannot say whether things are true or not, but onlywhether they are likely.42 The Metalogicon is entirely about ‘probablearguments’, not ‘demonstrative arguments’. This is because (in accor-dance with Aristotle’s own approach) its arguments are entirely derivedfrom sense perception, which is uncertain, and therefore cannot be usedfor investigating religious truths. But John is not in sympathy with‘Peripatetici’ either. For him, these are not the true followers of Aristo-tle, but are rather the teachers of logic in Paris, and John is particularlycritical of the emphasis they place on Porphyry’s Isagoge rather than onAristotle himself, and their concern with minutiae.43

John of Salisbury, then, emerges not as a member of a particularschool: he praises his teachers without describing himself as adisciple of any one of them. He finds the opinions of the ‘moderns’ valu-

concerning the soul.40See n. 12 above.41Met. I, 5, 13-14: ‘Peripateticus Palatinus qui logicae opinionem praeripuit om-

nibus coaetaneis suis, adeo ut solus Aristotilis crederetur usus colloquio’ (‘. . . thePeripatetic of Le Palais, who so completely robbed his contemporaries of fame aslogicians that he alone was believed to be on speaking terms with Aristotle’).

42Met. prol., 78-81: ‘Academicus in his quae sunt dubitabilia sapienti, non iuroverum esse quod loquor, sed seu verum seu falsum sit, sola probabilitate contentussum’ (‘An Academic in matters which to a wise man are debatable, I do not swearthat what I say is true, but, be it true or false, I remain content with probabilityalone’). Abelard, however, was more cautious than his critics lead us to believe,for he, too, claims only to give his opinion, and not the ‘truth’: cf. Ethics, ed. D.E. Luscombe, Oxford, 1971, p. 126: ‘Sufficit mihi in omnibus que scribo opinionemmeam magis exponere quam diffinicionem veritatis promittere’(‘It is sufficient for mein everything that I write to explain my own opinion rather than to promise thedefinition of truth’); and Theologia “Scholarium”, pref. 5, ed. C. J. Mews, CorpusChristianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 13, Turnhout, 1987, p. 314:‘. . .non tam nosveritatem docere promittentes, quam opinionis nostre sensum, . . . exponentes’(. . . ‘notpromising that we teach the truth as much as explaining the meaning of our ownopinion’). I owe these last two references to David Luscombe.

43Met. II, 17.

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able, and sometimes to be preferred to those of antiquity.44 However,by calling himself an ‘Academic’ he can adopt a sceptical view of thedogmas of all schools, and write as an independent scholar. The irony ofthe situation is that, as far as we know, John did not put any of his opin-ions into action: he did not teach, he did not write any textbooks basedon Aristotle’s writings, or on any other works that he admired, and hewas not instrumental in drawing up curricula for the schools. Jeauneaumay well be right in assigning to him the initiative for commissioning anew, easier to follow, translation of the Posterior Analytics,45 but thattranslation was not taken up by the schools and nearly disappearedaltogether. Partly because of his extensive travels, John was abreastwith, if not ahead of most scholars of his time, in knowing the latestlearning, especially in respect to Aristotle and medicine. But the schoolscontinued with their own momentum, apparently completely unaffectedby John’s criticisms or advice. His attitude towards Aristotle prefiguredrather than influenced the development of thirteenth-century scholasti-cism. For one reason or another Aristotle’s writings were to sweep asidethose of other ancient writers in the study of philosophy; John’s Meta-logicon provides a valuable insight into the beginning of this movement,but was itself soon swept aside by the very force of that movement.

Warburg Institute, UK.

44Met. prol., 69-70; see also Met. III, 4.45See p. 25 above.