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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
exhorting subjects to obey their king’s wishes as they obey God and never to
commit the sin of rebellion against his majesty. As An Exhortation to Obedience
states: “That is Gods ordinaunce, Gods commaundment and Gods holy will,
that the whole body of every realme and all the members and partes of the
same shalbe subject to their hed, their kynge.”3°
Although Henry VIII’s institutional reform itself was rather unexpected,
the public discourse applying the anthropomorphic analogy to legitimize it
was not unprecedented in England at all. The comparison of the structure
of society to the human body in English political thinking springs directly
from the intellectual legacy of the twelfth-century English bishop, John of
Salisbury. Instead of relying on the Pauline image of the “corpus mysticum” or
Aristotle’s notion of society as a human organism, he developed a remarkably
comprehensive description of the state in his work entitled Policratici sive
de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, or, in short, Policraticus, first
published in 1159.°%* His alleged source was Plutarch’s Institutio Traiani but
apart from Salisbury’s reference, there is no available record to support the
existence of Plutarch’s work. Today, the Policraticus is an excellent medieval
“compendium of all the lore surrounding the organic theory of the State,”?5
which in fact remained influential for many centuries. According to Ernst
Robert Curtius, it was printed all over Europe at least eight times between
the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.**° In the eight books of his work,
John of Salisbury investigates how the individual can preserve his or her
liberty and chance of maintaining a pleasant way of life by fulfilling a function
in the organic body of the state. There is more at risk here than individual
happiness. Similar to how illness attacks the human body, if any member of
society falls sick, this makes the whole body unable to function properly; it
therefore follows that preservation of the mutually beneficial cooperation of
the individual members of society serves the interests of the whole community.
Policraticus presents three alternations of the organic concept, the first of
which describes the fully developed analogy as follows:
36:
a
Ronald B. Bond (ed.): Certain Sermons and Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience
and Wilful Rebellion (1570), Toronto, Buffalo, London, Toronto University Press, 1987, 169.
This work, originally written in Latin, has never been translated into English in its entirety.
Only selections from some of the books have been published in English translation. In academic
circles, the twentieth-century critical edition of the Latin original is cited most often, as it is
widely accepted to be the most reliable version: Joannis Saresberiensis: Policraticus Sive de Nugis
Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, ed. Clement C. I. Webb, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909.
Barkan: Nature’s Work, 72.
366 Ernst Robert Curtius: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask,
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1973, 140.
364
36:
a
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