From Curiales to Courtiers
Interestingly enough, the strong reaction in courtly circles to his Epistle 14 soon compelled Peter of Blois to recant in his Epistle 150 (PL 207: 439–442): “Indeed, I acknowledge the sanctity of assisting our royal lord.” He went on quoting Horace: “Having pleased our leaders is not the last of merits,” adding, for good measure: “I deem it to be worthy of not simply praise but glory to be of help to a royal lord and to the state, to be unconcerned about one's own self, and to belong completely to all people.”[41] The last phrase was a recurrent topos of the literature on the courtly cleric, ultimately derived from Paul's omnia omnibus factus sum, “a man for all seasons.”
I have mentioned that the courtier's aptitude for calculation and intrigue was conspicuous in the literature though seldom defined as a spe-
cific psychological quality. The Facetus de moribus et vita, a mid-twelfth century versified manual of behavior which established a minor genre of didactic poems known by the same title, can boast a sort of priority in setting a canon of prudent dissimulation in public behavior for the sake of avoiding unnecessary offense.[42] It admonishes us to use restraint and be considerate of others by lying at the proper time, for to speak the truth at all time is counterproductive: “Esto verecundus, falsum quandoque loquaris, / Nam semper verum dicere crede nephas.”[43] Once again, we are bound to think ahead to Castiglione's advice concerning a prudent dissimulation as an essential part of the art of surviving and thriving at court.
Even more intriguing is that the Facetus conceived of both humanity and the civilized state as products of human “art,” art being innate in man as a potentia, which it is up to the individual to bring forth into actuality: “Ars hominem format” (86), and “habet omnis homo quo se possit fabricare.”[44] A remarkable thought indeed, with a clear “pre-humanistic” sound. Jaeger (168) may be overstressing it when he speaks of an “aesthetic of ethics,” attributing to the author a “measure of humanity” in this degree of “aestheticization.” The “art” of which the author speaks is not necessarily aesthetic, though it includes the aesthetic moment of human activity: it is rather the broad concept of “human activity,” homo faber, common to antiquity and the Middle Ages as well.
At the hands of the Ottonian and Salian clerics, courtliness was clearly not “art” but, precisely, “civilization”: culture was at the service of society, not, as it became in some extreme forms of Romanticism, a tool to subvert society and reject its given order. In this Germany made an original early contribution, and it may well have been “next to Christian ideals, the most powerful civilizing force in the West since ancient Rome” (Jaeger: 261) if, as Jaeger postulates, the “curial” ethos of state service spread from Germany to France and England and was eventually accepted by the knightly class, probably first in France. But before we accept this genetic process, further investigation is in order to supply some missing links (more on this later). The current state of our knowledge allows us to proceed on the assumption that further developments were entirely possible on the basis of the natural evolution of regional situations. Between courtier clerics and knights at court Jaeger sees a community of interests, which urged both to discipline themselves and to “behave” for success, while he wonders (264–265) why the free high nobility would have felt any need to tame their warrior ways. He suggests, in one word, fashion, with a strong role for literature in it. For
the time being, it appears reasonable to assume that the chivalric code which ripened in France spread to Germany by inserting itself into the rich underlying structure of the native ethical and social traditions. It was thus that the literary superimposed itself upon the practical.
German scholarship has experienced “agony” over the genesis of German chivalry (Jaeger: 174 f.). The ensuing polemic between Gustav Ehrismann and Ernst R. Curtius, as reflected in the miscellany Ritterliches Tugendsystem (1970), focused on the unnecessary postulate of Wernher von Elmendorf's translation (ca. 1170–1180) of the Moralium dogma philosophorum (perhaps wrongly attributed to Guillaume de Conches) as the intermediary between a creative, original French system of courtoisie and German adaptations.[45] But both “Guillaume” and Elmendorf were “compilers, not innovators,” and even the Ciceronian content of Elmendorf's tract was not a necessary importation, since it corresponded to the preexisting German substratum derived from court practices. These widely circulating compilations showed that a summary presentation of ethical wisdom tended to encompass Stoic criteria: John Holmberg's valuable edition of the Moralium dogma and its vernacular versions (1929) showed 165 quotations from Cicero's De officiis, along with 92 from Seneca, 104 from Horace, 40 from Juvenal, and so on. Jodocus Clichtoveus, publisher of the 1511 Paris edition, remarked that it “collected, among others, copious sentences on the four sources of the moral duties (officia ) according to the Stoic division that is called the four cardinal virtues.”[46] In any event, a close critical analysis of the Moralium dogma shows that it has no direct bearing on courtly/chivalric ethos.[47]
The fact remains that the tradition of courtesy and courtly love spread throughout the western lands under the impact of twelfth-century French literature, through the reinforcement and reinterpretation that came about with Dante and, even more, with Petrarca and then with Ficino's Platonism. Jaeger thus does not appear to succeed in his attempt to displace the origins of this phenomenon from France to Germany. But he does succeed brilliantly in locating an important background element of that literary phenomenon in the earlier curial ethos of imperial Germany.