John of Salisbury, Founder of Western Political Science

The first Western treatise on government that went beyond Stoic and patristic models was the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, written in 1159, 1_which created an immediate sensation throughout Europe.

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Written at the height of the Papal Revolution, the Norman Anonymous presented the case for sacral kingship and against the claims of the papal party. The author contended that both Christ's kingship and his priesthood are transferred directly to kings through the sacrament of coronation. As vicar of Christ, the king is himself divine and is also the priest of his people. Indeed, he can perform sacraments; after his coronation in accordance with Byzantine, Frankish, and Anglo-Saxon

tradition __ the emperor or king would go inside the sanctuary and present the bread and wine for his own communion. 3 The king is also the propitiator and savior of his people; therefore he can forgive sins.

According to the Norman Anonymous, Christ's priesthood is also transferred to all bishops, through St. Peter. The author criticized papal usurpation of the right of bishops to control monasteries within their own dioceses. Rome's uniqueness, he argued, consists merely in her ancient political and military power; St. Peter bestowed no more distinction on Rome than on Jerusalem and Antioch. The legalism of the canonists was also criticized: canon law, it was said, must always be interpreted in the spirit of the New Testament. Clerical marriage was defended: not all priests are called to celibacy. The high role of the laity in the church was defended. The sacrament of baptism was said to be fundamental to all others, including the eucharist. In all these matters the Norman Anonymous represented the ancien regime, the prerevolutionary order which dated from Carolingian times and before.

The style of the argument is of special interest. The Norman Anonymous was not a sober evaluation of the pros and cons of alternative positions; it was, instead, an impassioned plea of a dogmatic and prophetic character. It rested its major conclusion -- the Christ-centered quality of kingship -- not on practical experience but on scriptural symbolism, not on a logic of ends and means but on liturgy, not on legal justifications and analogies but on ecclesiastical tradition.

To a considerable extent, the stylistic qualities and the mode of analysis found in the Norman Anonymous were well suited to the basic political-ecclesiastical position to which the author adhered. Yet one may also find similar stylistic and methodological characteristics in many of the polemical writings of the papal party during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. It was only with the end of the great struggle, and after great compromises had been made by both sides, that there emerged a new style and a new mode of analysis and eventually a new science of the nature of government. The beginnings of the science are to be found in the writings of the jurists -- the canonists and the Romanists -- of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The first systematic treatise, however, was John of Salisbury's Policraticus, which built on the earlier juristic writings but went beyond them.

The Policraticus was not, of course, written in the style of present-day

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Western scholarship or even in the style of a John Locke or a Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who denounced scholasticism generally, would have had little patience with the discursive character of John of Salisbury's analysis, its apparent flitting from one subject to another, its abundant use of Biblical examples, its moralizing tendencies, and above all, its apparent inconsistencies. Many different theories of government were espoused, sometimes almost in passing. Moreover, the dominant theory of recent centuries of Western politics____________________________ that (in John Dickinson's words) "the

community can organize itself for the accomplishment of its common purposes by developing institutions for pooling the ideas and harmonizing the ends of its members"____________________________________________________ was completely

lacking.

Nevertheless, the Policraticus "discloses still in combination a number of separate strains of thought whose later dissociation was to form the main currents of opposing doctrine for many succeeding centuries." 5Prior to the Reformation these strains of thought continued to remain largely in combination; thereafter they came apart, and it was this dissociation that most distinguished post­Reformation from preReformation political thought. Thus Salisbury's derivation of the ruler's title directly from God foreshadowed the sixteenth-century theory of the divine right of kings, while his patriarchal theory of monarchy foreshadowed the seventeenth-century conception of personal absolutism; in his conception of a higher law binding the ruler he foreshadowed the doctrine of judicial supremacy advanced by Sir Edward Coke; his doctrine that insofar as men are free from sin and can live by grace alone they need no government anticipated (as Dickinson notes) the Christian communism of radical sects of the Protestant Reformation as well as modern doctrines of philosophic anarchism. So in the Policraticus Salisbury "discloses the more or less confused mass of contradictory ideas in which [later political theories] were originally embedded, and which served to limit and correct them." 6_In that sense the book may seem at first reading to be eclectic and syncretistic -- a fascinating hodgepodge. But on closer study it becomes apparent that it was not Salisbury's ideas that were confused; it was the political conditions of his time which were complex and contradictory, and it was his virtue to portray the complex structure of those political conditions and to rationalize their contradictions. That is what makes Policraticus a scientific work and not merely a utopian or programmatic work. In contrast to classical political thought, which saw various types of political authority (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) as mutually exclusive alternatives, Western political thought -- starting with John of Salisbury-saw them as coexisting in combination with one another.

For over a century Policraticus was considered throughout the West to be the most authoritative work on the nature of government. Its supremacy was not challenged until Thomas Aquinas, relying on Aristotle,

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tle's Politics, published his book On Kingship (De Regimine Principum). 7 _ Even then, however, it was recognized that Aquinas built not only on Aristotle but also on John of Salisbury.

Although the Politics was not available in the West when Salisbury wrote, the Policraticus has a strong Aristotelian dimension, due in part to the author's thorough grounding in those writings of Aristotle which had been translated (some of them very recently). 8_There were also nonAristotelian dimensions. Stoic and patristic influences were strong, reinforced by references to natural law, justice, equity, and reason from the lawbooks of Justinian. In addition, the Policraticus derived much from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from the history of the church and of the Roman Empire, including both its Byzantine and its Frankish-German counterparts. Yet none of these sources and influences were decisive; what was decisive was the way all of them were put together, and that way was characteristic of Western thought after the Papal Revolution.

This last point needs elaboration in view of the tendency of historians to explain the new by its origins in the past -- and thereby to explain everything about it except its newness. Some say that medieval political thought, including that of John of Salisbury, was basically in the tradition of the Stoics and the church fathers, supplemented by the Roman lawyers; that Aristotle had little or no influence until the writings of Aquinas; and that even thereafter Aristotelianism was not taken very seriously in political theory. 9_Others say, per contra, that all medieval thought, including political thought, is the history of the translation of Aristotle and that John of Salisbury's political theory was essentially an application of Aristotelian logic to the political realities of his time.

Yet it is also said that John of Salisbury's Policraticus was something new -- that it "contains the first political theory which breaks with the conceptions of the early middle ages and leads onwards to an era in which discussion of the rights and duties of princes takes the place of the old theory of the two swords." ¹³

What was new in the Policraticus, in the first place, was the author's effort to put together in a

comprehensive way theories, texts, and examples from the most diverse and contradictory sources -­Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Vergil, Ovid, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the church fathers, the Roman lawyers of Justinian's texts as glossed by John of Salisbury's own contemporaries, the canon lawyers, and others __ and to attempt to synthesize them. All were, in one sense, authoritative; but in another sense each was subject to criticism in the light of the others. This was the first application to politics of the method (later called "scholastic") which had already been applied much more rigorously____________ to Roman law by Irnerius and his successors, to

theology by Abelard (under whom John of Salisbury had studied), and to canon law by Gratian (with whose Decretum John of Salisbury was familiar).

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In the second place, in addition to the effort to synthesize, John found a method of actually achieving synthesis through the use of concepts which combined contradictory norms by abstracting their common qualities.

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concept: the prince as public power was still seen as the "head" whose task was to maintain the "state" (status) of the res publica, which was seen as the "body." The significant linguistic change in the sixteenth century was to identify that "state of the commonwealth," which hitherto the ruler had had the duty to direct and to serve, with the supreme political authority, the form of public power itself." 18.

Having converted the term prince into a general concept, John of Salisbury was able to develop a theory of government based on a distinction between two general types of princes which were contradictory to each other, although each was a species of the same genus. Princes of the first type ruled according to law, equity, and the "principle of the common welfare." Princes of the second type ruled by force, serving only their own wicked ends; they were "tyrants... [by whom] the laws are brought to nought and the people are reduced to slavery." ¹⁹

A similar distinction between a law-abiding king and a tyrant may be found in the writings of the church fathers and in ancient Greek political thought. But John of Salisbury's theory was far more complex than the earlier theories, since it accepted -- and drew conclusions from -- both the unity and the contradictory nature of the two types of rulership. Like the law-abiding king, the tyrant holds his power from God, since "all power is from the Lord God." "[When the ruler's] will is turned to cruelty against his subjects... it is the dispensation of God for His good pleasure to punish or chasten them... for good men thus regard power as worthy of veneration even when it comes as a plague upon the elect." 20The tyrant's laws must be obeyed. Even if they are evil laws, God's will is nevertheless accomplished through them. God "uses our evil for His own good purposes. Therefore, even the rule of a tyrant, too, is good, although nothing is worse than tyranny." ²¹

But this more or less traditional argument gradually shifted. An evil ruler, it was said, can no more escape the judgment of God than an evil people; if his people are patient, and if they turn from their own wickedness, God will at last free them from the oppressor. The history of oppression shows that evil rulers are usually punished. But more than that, if the tyrant commands a subject to act contrary to his faith, the subject must disobey. "Some things are... so detestable that no command will possibly justify them or render them permissible." ²² For example, if a military commander commands a soldier to deny God, or to commit adultery, the soldier must refuse. ²³More generally, "if [the prince] resists and opposes the divine commandments, and wishes to make me share in his war against God, then with unrestrained voice I must answer back that God must be preferred before any man on earth". 24

Thus the reader is confronted with two contradictory norms: the tyrant's laws must be obeyed, for the tyrant rules by God's will; yet the

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tyrant's laws must be disobeyed when they conflict with God's laws. At first the second norm appears as an exception to the first, only applicable in the case of the most evil commands. Yet the very tyranny itself may conflict with God's laws. The contradictions are carried further and further. Ultimately, the reader is confronted with the startling conclusion that a person may have a right and even a duty not only to disobey a tyrant but even to kill him the famous right and duty of

tyrannicide, which John of Salisbury was the first Western writer to elaborate as a doctrine and to defend with reasoned arguments. He starts with passive resistance: "If princes have departed little by little from the true way, even so it is not well to overthrow them utterly at once, but rather to reb uke injustice with patient reproof until finally it becomes obvious that they are stiff_necked in evil_doing". 25 In the last analysis, however, every person is under a duty to enforce the law by killing a tyrant who has put himself outside the law:

To kill a tyrant is not merely lawful, but right and just. For whosoever takes up the sword deserves to perish by the sword. And he is understood to take up the sword who usurps it by his own temerity and who does not receive the power of using it from God. Therefore the law rightly takes arms against him who disarms the laws, and the public power rages in fury against him who strives to bring to nought the public force. And while there are many acts which amount to lese majeste, none is a graver crime than that which is against the body of

Justice herself. Tyranny therefore is not merely a public crime, but, if there could be such a thing, a crime more than public. And if in the crime of lese majeste all men are admitted to be prosecutors, how much more should this be true in the case of the crime of subverting the laws which should rule even over emperors? Truly no one will avenge a public enemy, but rather whoever does not seek to bring him to punishment commits an offence against himself and the whole body of the earthly commonwealth. 26

John's acceptance of the fundamental unity of two contradictory norms -- government by law and government by force, both of which were attributed to divine will -- served as a foundation for later theories of Western political science. The complexity and modernity of such theories were enhanced by the fact that the contradictory norms which John postulated corresponded to the contradictory political realities of his age. Yet he never specifically identified those contemporary realities, nor did he ever refer to them. Despite -- or more likely, because of -- the fact that he was intimately acquainted with the leading figures of his time, including popes and antipopes, kings and tyrants, John avoided naming names and left his readers to apply his analysis to contemporary heroes and villains. No doubt it would have been politically risky for him to have done otherwise. It also would have been a distraction from his

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main purpose, which was to explore the basic theoretical dilemmas of power and justice which confronted the newly emerging secular states. But how was it possible to analyze political and constitutional norms realistically without giving actual cases?

This question was resolved in the Policraticus in a manner characteristic of the new scientific method of the twelfth century. A great many actual cases were put, but they were drawn from ancient Greek and Roman history, from the Old Testament, from the history of the Roman Empire, and so forth. The problems that determined the selection of these cases were not, however, the problems that had vexed ancient Greeks and Romans, Hebrews, or other predecessors of John and his contemporaries. They were the underlying political problems of the twelfth century, which were being debated in the universities, in the papal curia, and in the centers of political and cultural life in England, Normandy, southern Italy, Lombardy, Saxony, Swabia, France, Flanders, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe. To be sure, the numerous cases -- the fact situations which were analyzed, often at some length -- were found in the literary record of earlier civilizations. But this was by no means so unsatisfactory as it may at first seem. An empirical-inductive quality was introduced, a concern with actual experience, a casuistry, even though the cases were clothed in biblical, Graeco-Roman, or other costumes from older times. The result was a book which was not the portrayal of a utopia or ideal republic, on the one hand, and not a chronicle of decaying times, on the other, though it contained some elements of both. The mixture of empiricalinductive and ethical-normative qualities constituted, in fact, a third innovation of style and method introduced by the Policraticus.

One example of the way in which the ethical-normative method and the empirical-inductive method were combined in the Policraticus is the treatment of the fundamental problem of the selection of a new prince when a throne becomes vacant. Generally speaking, tribal, feudal, and imperial tradition had all emphasized two basic principles of succession: heredity and election. The ideal solution was for the leading men to elect the oldest son of the dead ruler. However, when the oldest son did not command sufficient support among the leading men, there was trouble. Some might favor another son or a brother or cousin or another relative. The closer his relationship to the dead king by blood or marriage, the easier it was for a candidate to gain support from those who had the power to elect, unless there was an uprising against the entire dynasty.

Prior to the Papal Revolution, the role of ecclesiastical leaders in the choice of a successor was not apt to be essentially different from the role of lay magnates. Bishops and other leading churchmen were themselves imperial and royal councillors, feudal lords, and even clan or dynastic figures. With the centralization of clerical control in the hands of the

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papacy, however, and with the separation of the ecclesiastical from the secular authority, the church began to play a distinct and independent role in influencing royal elections. Thus an additional complicating factor was added to the great uncertainty which often surrounded the succession.

In 1159, when John of Salisbury wrote the Policraticus, a new dynasty had recently been founded in Norman England by a powerful monarch who was most anxious to secure the succession for his descendants. (In 1170 Henry II had his oldest son, Henry, crowned in advance, and in 1172 he had him crowned again, with his wife.) John was thoroughly familiar with similar tendencies to strengthen the hereditary principle in other states, including Norman Sicily (southern Italy) and Capetian France. He was also aware of the problems connected with the election of the emperor: a system had been developing, especially since 1125, whereby the imperial succession was determined principally by vote of a certain number of the princes of the various (mostly German) duchies; eventually the number of "electors" was fixed at seven, including three archbishops, those of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. However, the election was usually strongly influenced in favor of the reigning imperial dynasty; in fact, the imperial crown tended to descend to the eldest son or to some other close relative of the deceased emperor.

In the twelfth century and thereafter, the lawyers -- Romanists and canonists alike -- had a great deal to say about these matters. They tended to analyze them in terms of a wide variety of fairly narrow topics, such as the rules of hereditary succession through male and female lines, the question of the source of power to elect a king or emperor, the validity of election procedures, and the effect of papal excommunication on the legitimacy of the ruler. Such questions were discussed by the jurists in the light of various authoritative texts and legal doctrines, in the light of customs and decrees, and in the light of actual historical cases. ²⁷

The Policraticus did not go deeply into the legal aspects of the question of royal succession; instead, it sought to establish a theoretical resolution of the conflict between the principle of heredity and the principle of election, and to justify ecclesiastical intervention. The "cases" selected for illustration or support were not drawn from the history of Europe. There was a discussion of the selection of Joshua to succeed Moses: "Moses called together the whole synagogue to the end that he might be chosen in the presence of the people, so that afterwards no man might remain to cloud his title." On the other hand, it was God Himself who told Moses to name Joshua the ruler. John commented: "Here is plainly no acclamation by the people, no argument or title founded upon ties of blood, no consideration accorded to family relationship." ²⁸ Then another story from the Bible was mentioned: the daughters of Salphaat came before Moses to claim their father's inheritance. Their petition "was a just one,

-284- for a man's inheritance of lands and estates is to be left to his relatives, and so far as possible, his public office likewise. But governance of the people is to be handed over to him whom God has chosen, to wit such a man as has in him the spirit of God... [and who has] walked in the judgments of the Lord." ²⁹

Thus John of Salisbury concluded that to become a prince one must be chosen by God -- which meant that one must have the approval of the ecclesiastical authority. Since the prince is subject to God, he is subject also to the priesthood, "who represent God upon earth." ³⁰ He is a "minister of the priestly power," which has handed over to him the temporal sword, "the sword of blood," which the priesthood itself is too pure to wield directly. 31

It was not denied that heredity is an important factor in the succession to princely power: "It is not right," John stated, "to pass over, in favor of new men, the blood of princes, who are entitled by the divine promise and the right of family to be succeeded by their own children." ³² Election is also an important factor: John cited a famous passage in Justinian's Digest which refers to the transfer of power to the emperor by the Roman people, and argued that the prince is therefore "representative" or "vicar" of the people. ³³ Yet he rejected each of these principles as an absolute. Heredity creates a presumptive claim to the throne, which must be confirmed by election, but the priesthood-that is, the papacy -- has a decisive voice when it is in the overriding interest of the church to exercise it. The theory on which this is based is that royal title is derived from God either through heredity or through election or through such other means as God in a given instance chooses to apply. ³⁴

This example illustrates the synthesis of opposites which was characteristic of scholastic thought in the twelfth century. More specifically, it exemplifies the combining of ethical-normative reasoning with empirical-inductive reasoning. The ethical-normative aspect is obvious: first, the prince should follow the judgments of God and should attempt to obey the divine commandments; second, if the pope, who is charged with supreme responsibility for interpreting the divine will, determines that a candidate for the throne is a heretic or schismatic or otherwise an enemy of the church, such a candidate will not be qualified despite any claims he may have by virtue of heredity or election. The empirical and inductive aspect is less obvious, but it is there. In the first place, the entire exposition is concerned with the realities that determined succession to European thrones in the twelfth century and afterwards: heredity, election, and papal intervention. ³⁵ In the second place, John's recourse to the Bible and to Greek and Roman literature for concrete examples gave the Policraticus a broad empirical basis from which to draw conclusions. Contemporary European cases were too close to home to be analyzed objectively in terms of political theory; they

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could only be analyzed objectively in terms of legal theory, because there the terms of analysis were narrower and were ultimately limited by textual authorities. Contemporary cases were also too complicated; that is, too much was known about them, and hence they were much more difficult to simplify. Examples from antiquity were, for John of Salisbury and his contemporaries, rather like the examples from other cultures used by modern political theorists. They provided a kind of universal anthropological context.

Closely connected with (1) the effort to synthesize opposite norms, (2) by use of general concepts, (3) which corresponded to empirical realities, was a fourth innovation of the scholastic method, which John of Salisbury was the first to apply to the study of secular political institutions. That was the effort to grasp the entire subject matter under consideration as a single whole, an integrated system, and characteristically, to portray the whole in organic terms, as a body.

The Policraticus introduced into European thought, for the first time, an organic theory of the secular political order: it was the first European work to elaborate the metaphor that every principality, that is, every territorial polity headed by a ruler, is a body. The prince is compared with the head, the senate with the heart, the judges and provincial rulers with the eyes, ears, and tongue, the soldiers with the hands, the tillers of the soil with the feet. The analogy is carried so far as to liken the financial officers and keepers of the king's treasure to the stomach and intestines, "which, if they become congested through excessive avidity, and retain too tenaciously their accumulations, generate innumerable and incurable diseases, so that through their ailment the whole body is threatened with destruction." 36 Similar metaphors may be found in ancient Greek political thought, and John of Salisbury was familiar with at least Plutarch's use of them and drew on it; nevertheless, the organic metaphor in the Policraticus had distinctive features. One is reminded of modern systems theory, with its concepts of flows, subordination, and hierarchy, feedback, controller, and program.

The organic metaphor implies that government, that is, political rule, is natural to man. It is not something which is necessarily imposed on society by force, nor does it originate in a compact or convention. These two alternatives-the coercive theory and the contractual theory -- had been elaborated by the Stoics and the church fathers, and had dominated Western political thought prior to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. ³⁷ Both rested on an essentially static view of human nature. Stoic and patristic thought postulated that originally man had lived in a state of virtue, either in paradise or else, in Israel, under the patriarchs, Moses, and the judges. Through his inherent sinfulness, however, man had forfeited rule by charity or higher law. Positive regulation had been forcibly imposed upon him by coercive monarchical government; or else

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civil strife had induced him to consent willingly, by a kind of social contract, to monarchical government. Whether introduced by force or by compact, political controls were viewed as a response to man's wickedness rather than to his fundamental desire to live in peace and harmony.

The organic concept of political rule and the concept of its naturalness, which are found in the Policraticus, are more akin to Aristotelian thought than to Stoic or patristic thought. Although Aristotle's Politics was not available to John of Salisbury, he shared with Aristotle the view that the political community is subject to the law of nature, which is reason, and that nature or reason requires the king to rule according to justice and equity. This view is explicit in the Policraticus; it is also implicit in the metaphor of the "body politic."

The metaphor of the body politic also supported a territorial view of the political community. This, too was congenial to classical Greek concepts of organic unity and of a natural division of labor between rulers and ruled. Such concepts became more relevant as Western society moved rapidly from tribal, local, feudal, and sacral-imperial modes of ordering to large, consolidated territorial polities with fairly strong central governments.

Yet it is a mistake to suppose that Aristotelian and other ancient Greek concepts meant the same thing to John of Salisbury and his contemporaries as they had meant to the ancient Greeks. The very premise of Aristotle's political theory, expressed in the first paragraph of the Politics -- namely, that the highest end of human life is the common good of the political community ³⁸ -- was acceptable to medieval Christian thought only by a series of reinterpretations which would have seemed very strange to Aristotle. In the Policraticus it is taken for granted that the political community is subordinate to the salvation of human souls under the judgment of God. Aristotle's "nature" is understood by John of Salisbury to be an instrument of divine will. Aristotle's "reason" is taken by John to be a mode of proving divine revelation. It is only with considerable difficulty, and only at a rather high level of abstraction, that such views can be reconciled with Aristotelian thought. A little more than a century after John, Thomas Aquinas labored to show that secular naturalism and religious naturalism -- insofar as they are both concerned with human nature, and especially with man's moral and rational nature -­do lead to similar conclusions from different starting points. But the difference in starting points can never be obliterated, and it always returns to haunt the argument.

Another aspect of John of Salisbury's theory was not only difficult to reconcile with Greek thought but was wholly repugnant to it: that God manifests himself in two opposing communities at the same time and place, and that every Christian lives in both -- the community ruled by

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the temporal authority and the community ruled by the priesthood. These are two distinct political communities. Yet the temporal community_the prince and all his subjects_______________________________________________________ are also members of the

ecclesiastical community, the church, and are under its authority. Moreover, the church, while it has the quality of a spiritual community which is not of this world, also has a political dimension: it, too, is a body ruled by a head, a prince (namely, the pope), and in pursuing its spiritual interests it inevitably becomes involved in temporal, that is, secular, affairs.

Thus the classical Greek metaphor of the body politic and the Aristotelian concept of the source of government in nature and reason were used by John of Salisbury in a historical context that was completely non-Greek and non-Aristotelian. The political community, which for Aristotle meant the entire social life of the people of a given place, was split into two bodies, the body of the church and the body of the secular polity, whether a kingdom, duchy, city, or empire. Indeed, Western thinkers could only conceive of the secular community as a body after the Papal Revolution had divided the West into ecclesiastical and secular polities. ³⁹ Before then, the political community, headed by sacral emperors and kings, was wholly mixed up with the church; neither one was a body in the Greek sense, and both together, as the Christian community, were called a body in another mystical sense -- namely, the spiritual body of Christ. Thus for St. Augustine priests and bishops lived in the same two cities -- the heavenly and the earthly -- like other saints and sinners, and neither city was an organic political entity. It was only with the division of Western Christendom into an ecclesiastical polity and a secular polity in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries that the Greek organic theory became applicable to Western politics for the first time -- but to only half of it, the secular half.

In fact, the circumstances to which Greek modes of thought were applied by John of Salisbury and other writers of his time were so different from the circumstances in which those modes of thought had originated that it is astonishing that John and the others were able to apply them at all. John was concerned to explain -- and influence -- a situation which Aristotle would have found completely strange: the coexistence of a number of kingdoms, principalities, feudal territories, cities, and other autonomous secular polities within a centralized ecclesiastical state. It was John's genius to construct a theory -- partly out of Aristotelian, partly out of Stoic, and partly out of other (Roman, Hebraic, patristic, Byzantine, Frankish) elements -- which interpreted that situation in both normative and empirical terms.