any advance or development from that simple little manual
which Jonas, bishop of Orleans, had compiled more than
three centuries earlier for the instruction of Pippin, king
of Aquitaine.[1] Jonas indeed is less ambitious and con
tents himself for the most part with stringing together
extracts from the Bible and the fathers ; but John of
Salisbury s classical erudition did not lead him at all to
modify the main point, of the supremacy of the church
over the world. Both writers alike find their best examples
in Deuteronomy.[2]
The Bible however furnishes but scanty materials for determining more minutely the mutual relation of the several elements of the state, and John has recourse to a late Roman treatise, the Institutio Traiani already referred to, from which he draws the following simile. The state, he says, has been likened to a living organism of which the soul is represented by religion, the head by the prince, and the other members by the various efficient classes of society. The hands are the soldiery, the feet the husbandmen and working people ; the belly is the administration of finance, always inclined to surfeit and bring disorder upon the rest of the body ; and the heart is the senate. John does not here enforce the principle, upon which indeed he has previously laid sufficient stress, of the subordination of the temporal state to the spiritual. He portrays religion as the soul of government for the obvious reason that its care is for the interests of the soul ; and if he recurs to the high estimation in which the priesthood ought to be held, it is simply as a corollary from the reverence due to things in which
- ↑ The treatise to which dom d’Achery prefixed the title De institutione regia (Spicilegium 1. 323, ed. 1723) is a sort of special supplement to the bishop s three books De institutione laicali, his Holy Living, we may say, schen printed ibid., pp. 258-323. I do not assert John of Salisbury s in- debtedness to the book, for there is no evidence of the degree of popularity it enjoyed. The editors of it mention only two manu- scripts, one at Rome, the other at Orleans, p. 324.
- ↑ I cannot therefore agree with Dr Sigmund Riezler, Die literari- Widersacher der Papste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers 136, 1874, that the use of the Old Testament forms a peculiar characteristic of the Policraticus.
