Jean de Salisbury

Jean de Salisbury , born towards 1115 with Salisbury, in the county of the Wiltshire in England and died in 1180, is a Philosophe and Historien English, member of the École of Chartres.

Jean de Salisbury made his studies in France. Student of the University of Paris, it was there, as of 1136, the pupil of Abélard and it was to continue to study the Logique under the direction of Robert of Melun, the Grammaire under that of Guillaume de Conches.

Secretary and friend of Thomas Becket, then chancellor of England, it was in particular in charge of the relations of the archbishop's palace with papacy. He returned, in his Vie of Thomas Becket , a posthumous homage to that which he advised of many times.

Bishop of Chartres of 1176 with 1180, it fills of many missions in Rome near Eugene III and of Adrien IV. This senior official with the Roman Curie was then secretary of the Archevêque of Canterbury.

He was one of the men of his time who knew best Antiquity. Its principal work, very famous with the Middle Ages and one of the first printed books, is entitled: Polycraticus, of Nugis curialium and vestigiis philosophorum , a kind of moral encyclopedia, in eight books, where the author, with more scholarship than of grace, opposes to frivolities of the world and the court the solids lesson of philosophy.

At the head recreations which it tackles finds hunting, means of vexation against the weak ones. The set of dice, the music and the musicians, the actors, the ménestrels, the jugglers, are not saved. The author shows the vanity of the magic, of sorcery, although it does not push back all kinds of predict.

The third book, directed against the flattering ones and the parasites, ends in a chapter against the tyrants. The tyrannicide is approved there, but to the Church alone it belongs to declare that a prince is tyrant. For the friend of Thomas Becket, the royalty is only the maidservant of the Church. All this examination of the company has as a conclusion a theory of the duties borrowed from the old philosophers, and the author finishes while reconsidering the tyrannicide and the duty to kill the tyrants.

Completed in 1156, the Polycraticus is addressed, in a poetic introduction, in Thomas Becket. Under the title not very different of Entheticus , Jean de Salisbury made, in elegiac worms, a kind of summary of his great work, filled of allusions satirical, today extremely difficult to include/understand.

Lastly, to defend philosophy, i.e. the old letters, against the attacks of the Jean, society peoples de Salisbury wrote his Metalogicus in six books. For these works, it is necessary to add its Lettres , which are very important for the history of time.

Quotations

“ an illiterate king is only one ass crowned ”

Source

Gustave Vapereau, universal Dictionary of the literatures , Paris, Hatchet, 1876, p. 1096

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