Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis
of its author.
Those “sinful authors” Solomon and David are invoked to similar effect in what is probably the most daring defense of Jean de Meun to figure in the querelle de la Rose of the early fifteenth century. Pierre Col went beyond all analogies with Ovid—a major strategy in the querelle—to appeal to the precedent of Biblical lovers.27 Chancellor Jean Gerson had attacked the Rose on the grounds that “he who made it was a foolish lover.” Why then, Col retorts, does Gerson not make similar charges against Solomon, David, and other foolish lovers, who lived long before Jean de Meun, and “whose books are made a part of holy Scripture and their words a part of the holy mystery of the Mass”? It was “a foolish lover” (David) who “caused Uriah the good knight to be killed by treachery in order to commit adultery with his wife.” It was “a foolish lover” (Solomon) “who caused the temples with the idols to be built for the love of strange women.” If they are not to be condemned, neither should Jean de Meun.
Col raises the stakes even higher by comparing Jean de Meun’s situation to those of Saints Peter and Paul. Those revered auctores were more firm in the faith after they had sinned, he declares; similarly, Jean de Meun, because he had been a foolish lover, was very firm in reason, for the more he knew by his own experience the folly of foolish love the more he was able to despise it and praise reason. When he wrote the Rose he was no longer a foolish lover, and had repented of having been one—as is evident from the fact that he speaks so well of reason. The voice of “Raison,” it would seem, is in large measure the voice of Jean de Meun.28
The ingenious appeals to the Bible by Giovanni Boccaccio and Pierre Col echo a long-running controversy in Biblical exegesis, over how the fallibility of major Scriptural auctores could be reconciled with their undeniable authority. For generations theologians had attempted to cope with harsh historical facts concerning the lives of Kings David and Solomon.29 Here the strategies of allegorization were invaluable, David being interpreted as Christ, Bathsheba as the Church, and Uriah as the devil. Alternatively, the literal sense could be confronted, with David, Solomon, and (in a very different capacity) St. Paul being deployed as exempla of what to do and what to avoid. St. Bonaventure, writing c.1254–57 in his commentary on Ecclesiastes (then supposed to be by Solomon), affirmed that this work was written not by a sinner but by a penitent man who regretted his sins.30 This is in response to three powerful counter-arguments. First, when a carnal man preaches spiritual things, he scandalizes rather than edifies; therefore this book is likely to cause scandal rather than edification.31 Second, in Psalm 49:16 we hear God saying to the sinner, “Why dost thou declare my justices?” a dire penalty being threatened for such presumption (cf. v. 21. This auctoritas was to resonate through scholastic discussions of the immoral present-day preacher, as discussed in Chapter 1 below).32 If Solomon was a sinner, therefore he sins by declaring the divine justice. Third, a good author builds up faith, promotes trust and confidence. But an evil one does not—in conflict with the aim of holy Scripture, which is to generate faith. Bonaventure responds by affirming the opinion of Jerome that Ecclesiastes was the work of a repentant man. Because God does not cast away those who are repentant, it follows that Solomon was not in a reprehensible state when he wrote this book. Furthermore, Bonaventure continues, it may be argued that the holy Spirit speaks what is true and good not only through the good but also through the evil. Hence our Lord advises that we should “do what they say, not what they do” (cf. Matthew 23:3). He prophesied most clearly through the problematic Balaam (cf. Numbers 23 and 24); likewise, God said many good things through Solomon, although he was a carnal man. Solomon’s sin had nothing to do with his teaching, but everything to do with his failure to behave as he ought.
Arguments like this were probably in Col’s mind when he challenged Gerson’s reading of the Rose. Its implication seems to be that a writer’s amatory experience does not necessarily invalidate his work—providing that he has put his amours behind him (like David, and indeed like the chastised Ovid). But what if a writer does not leave his love behind? If, as in the case of Dante as described in Boccaccio’s Trattatello, the emotion persists? That is a far more difficult proposition to defend. But Col, to his intellectual credit, tries to do just that in a later part of the letter quoted above.33 First he argues that in itself to be a clerk, a philosopher, or a theologian is not irreconcilable with being a foolish lover—witness the examples of David, Solomon, and others. Indeed, he adds, some clerics even say that Solomon wrote the Song of Songs on account of his love of Pharaoh’s daughter. Why, one could bring forth “more than a thousand examples of people who were clerks and at the same time foolish lovers”! These roles are as compatible with one another “as being at once clerk and knight,” as were Pompey, Julius Caesar, Scipio, and Cicero.
Col then proceeds to taunt Gerson by suggesting that the Chancellor should not judge others by himself. Because he is a clerk, philosopher, and theologian without being a foolish lover, he assumed that all men behaved similarly. Which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, even if the great Gerson were, in the future, to become a foolish lover, that would not make him any the less a clerk—at least, not at the beginning of this passion.34
This vacillation is fascinating. On the one hand, Col does not want to set aside the argument that Jean de Meun composed his poetry not as an actual lover but as a repentant one. On the other, he is tempted to go for the more daring proposition that even if Jean had written the Rose while under the influence of foolish love, this would not have interfered with the text’s clerkly, philosophical, and theological achievements. And here perhaps he comes close to Petrarch’s attitude regarding Cicero, as described above. A man can do his job and exercise his professional skills whether or not he is weak in adversity, inconstant in his loyalties, or in love/lust. On the same argument, the intellectual and rhetorical skills necessary to produce brilliant poetry or prose are not destroyed by an author’s moral deficiencies. It seems that we can trust an author’s text, even though in certain cases we cannot trust the author himself. The inference could be drawn that, if we cannot trust the teller, at least we can trust his tale.
The significance of this and related issues can be appreciated better if we move beyond the specifics of textual authorship and authority to consider the wider context in which they belong. For medieval auctor-theory did not occupy some sort of autonomous, specially privileged site of its own (“aesthetic,” literary-critical/theoretical or whatever) but rather partook of discourses which feature crucially in accounts of the formation of the king, the pope, the priest, the preacher. . . . This point may be substantiated in the first instance with reference to the “political theology” behind the notion of “the king’s two bodies.” Here, of course, I am indebted to Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s brilliant study of that subject (originally published in 1957), which retains much of its original challenge.35
Writing around 1100 in his De consecratione pontificum et regum, “the Norman anonymous” speaks of the “twin person” of the king, “one descending from nature, the other from grace.” In one sense, he was, by nature, an individual man (individuus homo); in another he was, “by grace, a Christ-like figure, that is, a God-man (Christus, id est Deus-homo).”36 To put it another way, in terms of his officium (“office,” public role, vocation) the king is the very image and figure of God.37 Such a “yoking of two seemingly heterogeneous spheres” had “a particular attraction for an age eager to reconcile the duality of this world and the other, of things temporal and eternal, secular and spiritual.” Unfortunately, in certain formulations the two spheres seemed to be too heterogenous to yoke together. The “danger of a royal Nestorianism” was “great at all times” in discussion of the king’s two bodies, Kantorowicz admits,38 here drawing an analogy with the way in which the Nestorian heresy had put asunder the two persons of Christ, His divine and human natures.
Subsequently the relevant discourses pulled in two directions: on the one hand a “more theocratical-juristical idea of government” emerged within the political sphere, while on the other notions relating to the “quasi-priestly and sacramental essence of kingship” evolved into the late-medieval theory of kingship by “divine right.”39 Future formulations are intimated in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (c. 1115–80),