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), who held the view that “Not the Prince rules, but Justice rules through or in a Prince who is the instrument of Justice.”40 “The prince is the public power and a certain image on earth of the divine majesty,” argues John, and “in all matters” he “prefers the advantage of others to his private will (privata voluntas),” and indeed “in public affairs” he is “not permitted his own will unless it is prompted by law or equity.”41 As the bearer of the persona publica the prince “punishes all injuries and wrongs, and also all crimes,” not incurring individual blame for the blood which is shed in the process.42 Similarly, in his Summa theologiae St. Thomas Aquinas O.P. (c. 1225–74), argued that a private person (persona privata) has no authority to compel right living; rather the power of compulsion belongs either to the community as a whole or to its persona publica, i.e., its ruler, who has the duty of inflicting punishments.43
The risk of anachronism in interpreting such material is great. Kantorowicz has rightly cautioned us against inferring from it the existence of the concept of the “king as a purely private person” in the modern sense of the term. The crucial line of distinction, he believes, should be drawn “between the king alone in his relations to individual subjects, and matters affecting all subjects, the whole polity.”44 And the persona privata considered as a body should not, of course, be confused with the king’s material body; that entity is not specifically covered by the discourse of “the king’s two bodies”—one good reason for not employing that discourse as a crucial analytical paradigm throughout this book.45 Of course, the material body did matter, and could impact on the metaphoric “two bodies” in crucial ways.
With this caveat in mind, we may turn to consider briefly the distinctions between “public” and private,” the “official” and the “individual,” which emerged in medieval valuations of the figure of the pope. Walter Ullmann has investigated how Leo I (who died in 461) used Roman law to clarify the issue of papal power, identifying as a major change “the separation of the (objective) office of the pope” which originated with St. Peter “from the (subjective) personality of the pope.” For governmental purposes, Ullmann continues, “it was the office of the pope, the papacy as such, which mattered”; the issue of whether someone was a “good” or “bad” pope was not crucial. “The pope as office holder was conceived to be an instrument to execute the office, that is, to translate the abstract programme of the papacy.”46 Thus, “subjective standards and personal qualifications were irrelevant as far as the scope and extent of the office were concerned. In other words, within the terms of papal primatial doctrine the validity of a papal act or decree or judgment did not depend upon the morality or sanctity or other subjective-moral standards applicable to the person of the pope, but solely upon whether or not the judgment or decree was legally valid. . . . The office, in a word, absorbed the man.” Here there is, perhaps, a tendency toward a sort of Monophysitism. On the analogy with the heresy which denied human nature in the person of the incarnated Christ, it might be said that this view of the officium papae tends to have the higher, divine element subjugate the lower, human one. However, in the later Middle Ages there were substantial challenges to this tendency. The “intellectual revolution” (as Ullmann terms it) of Aristotle’s teachings, particularly on ethics and politics, contributed to the emergence of “the conception of the individual as a citizen” with specific rights and responsibilities rather than as a mere “subject” who received “doctrine clothed in the law” which had to be obeyed.47 At the end of the thirteenth century a “subjective point of view” regarding the papacy became clearly visible. The distinction “between office and person was now beginning to be reversed”: “What began to matter was the personality of the pope, was whether he was a morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pope.”48
The significance of that disassociation is richly problematic—not susceptible of generalization but rather to be sought in specific times, places, people. To take one particularly telling case, Pope Clement VI (1342–52) was adamant that “the personality of an individual office-holder could not change the nature of the office,” as Diana Wood puts it.49 Thus he “strained every nerve to convey a sense of the vast abyss which separated the heavenly office from the earth-bound man.” It is quite true that Clement frequently described himself as unworthy. But such self-abasement may be read as a strategy of self-aggrandizement—behold the frail shoulders on which such a heavy burden of responsibility rests! In other words, “the separation between the person and the office was simply a device to enable the Pope to stress his sovereign status.”50 One among many exercises of that sovereign status was the bull Unigenitus Dei filius, promulgated in good time for the Roman jubilee year of 1350, which lent papal authority to a doctrine of indulgences or “pardons” from the punishment of sin, as developed by the major schoolmen of the thirteenth century. Here Clement consolidated the papal claim to dispense merit to sinners from the vast spiritual treasury which had been filled by the surplus or supererogatory merits of Christ and his Saints—a point to which we will return in our discussion of Chaucer’s Pardoner qua pardoner or “publisher” and distributor of indulgences.
On the other hand, the disassociation of office and man could be deployed to diminish rather than aggrandize the papal office—as
