Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/222

204 with it. But the writer was in fact going far beyond what his party required: for certainly nothing could have been more distasteful to Gregory the Seventh and his followers than to give subjects a general right of deposing their sovereigns. All that the pope maintained was that they should be ready to rise in arms against them at the bidding of the head of the church. Individual or popular liberty was the last thing Gregory wished to establish; absolute obedience was as much a part of his theory as it was of the imperialists: the only question was to whom, as the supreme lord, it was due.

It was not however until a considerably later date that the upholders of the independence of the civil state ventured to frame a counter-theory for their action. For the present they were content to rely on the established usage of the Latin church and on the formal recognition by Nicholas the Second of the emperor's right to ratify the election of the pope. If they be held to have had the better of the argument, they limited themselves to the temporary demands of controversy. The first attempt to look apart from surrounding conditions and to produce a coherent system which should aspire to the character of a philosophy of politics came from the other side. When John of Salisbury applied himself to this subject in three books of his Policraticus there is nothing to remind us that the contest between Frederick Barbarossa and Hadrian the Fourth was just then ripening to a declaration of hostilities, or that the author himself was alienated from royal favour on account of his attachment to the policy of saint Thomas Becket. His treatment bears no reference to contemporary forms of government. His examples are those of the Old Testament or of the ancient Roman empire; there is not a trace even of the terminology of feudalism. John may now and then allude incidentally to modern customs, but it is only by way of