as to Bullinger, a theologian such as Augustine may be considered a poet, but
Homer and other pagan authors cannot be thought theologians. This is the
principal difference between him and Southern Renaissance humanists like
Salutati and this too, as we shall see, is what marks out both the Protestant and
the Catholic use of the fathers in the Reformation, another proof of the
popularity of Basil of Caesarea’s view as conveyed by Bruni’s translation.
Scholars who edit the fathers and, more generally, theologians whofind that
Homer is to be treated on equal footing with the fathers of the church are
indeed few and far between in the Northern Renaissance of the early modern
era. The church fathers, however, assume their full importance in the study of
humanities and in theology as constituting the perfect midpoint between
Homer and the scholastic‘barbarians’such as Duns Scotus. At the same
time, as we saw, Homer and other pagan writers and poets are not necessarily
merely propaedeutic, since they also have an important role to play in the
construction of the Christian state, as noted above by Bullinger—a view
I might add that Melanchthon upholds with even greater conviction.
To return to the Augustineflorilegium in theReformatio, who is its author if
it is neither Murner himself nor Locher, his former teacher? Murner himself
throws light on this when telling us that in 1499/1500 he attended a course in
Christian rhetoric in Krakow, given by Johannes Glogoviensis (d. 1507).^18 He
explains that Glogoviensis relied especially onDe doctrina christiana, book 4,
so as to establish a hierarchy of eloquence in an ascending order from pagan to
Christian, using the metaphor of different types of rider and steed. Thus a
pagan orator or poet can be likened to a little boy riding a stick for a horse,
a political orator can be compared to a farmer riding a horse to market, and a
sacred orator is to be compared to an emperor riding a horse to a public
function.^19 The expressionpoeta canonicusfor a sacred orator was alsofirst
used by Glogoviensis. Theflorilegiumof extracts from Augustine’sDoctr. chr.
4 is to be found in book 2 of theReformatio. Murner introduces it with a brief
reminder of Augustine’s argument: the three aims of an orator as defined by
Cicero, that is, to teach, to delight, and to move, and the corresponding three
styles (simple, moderate, and sublime) should also apply to Christian rhetoric.
However, a sacred orator differs fundamentally from his pagan counterpart in
treating only of great matters. For that reason a sacred orator cannot delight
his audience unless he moves and teaches at the same time. Augustine gives
numerous examples of each of the three styles, drawing upon the Pauline
epistles and on the works of Cyprian and Ambrose. He also recommends that
(^18) In part 1, chapter 1. On Glogoviensis, see StefanṠwieẑawski,‘Materiaɫy do studiȯw nad
Janem z Gɫogowa (+ 1507)’,Studia mediewistyczne2 (1961), 135–84.
(^19) See Murner,Reformatio, I.3, fol.6r:‘Eloquentia prophanorum equitatui puerile perinde
similis esse dinoscitur; rustico autem imperialis comparanda censeatur; caesarea autem eloquen-
tia canonicae restat simillima.’
40 Irena Backus