Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/225

Rh 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. Jonas indeed is less ambitious and contents 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.

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