ALFANO (Alphanus), archbishop of Salerno. - Theologian, philosopher, physician, poet. Born in Salerno to a most noble family between 1015 and 1020, died on 9 October 1085. He lived during the golden age of his homeland, witnessing the greatness to which that principality was elevated by Guaimar V. When a palace conspiracy, in which his own brothers were implicated (cf. Chron. Casin., III, 7), ended that Lombard prince in bloodshed (3 June 1052), he mourned his tragic end as the loss of the “father of the fatherland” and “all the honor of life” (cf. the elegy to Guido: PL 147, 1257).
He was directed toward the priesthood and studied at the celebrated local medical school, becoming one of its finest luminaries. “Medicus et clericus,” he formed a friendship in Salerno with Desiderius, whom he treated for exhaustion and stomach weakness; and drawn by him to the monastic ideal, he entered with him the monastery of S. Sofia in Benevento (1054). He then went to Montecassino (1056), where with Desiderius and Frederick of Lorraine—likewise gifted and learned men—he contributed to the glory of the abbey. But the collaboration of the three friends was brief, for Frederick (1057) became Pope Stephen X (IX), and Desiderius (the future Pope Victor III) succeeded him as abbot; while A., urged by Gisulf II, prince of Salerno, returned to his native city to govern the Benedictine monastery and, in 1058, the archdiocese. He was consecrated by his august friend, Stephen X.
His episcopate marked a period of splendor for the Church of Salerno. He reorganized the Chapter, enriching it with numerous privileges obtained from the Pope and the prince. In 1059 he attended the councils of Rome, Melfi, and Benevento. In these solemn assemblies he formed a friendship with Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, whose designs for ecclesiastical reform he shared, and he supported his efforts in the struggle for the freedom of the Church (cf. the poem Ad Hildebrandum).
He took part in the great events of his turbulent age. In 1062 he accompanied his prince Gisulf II, who, feigning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, went to Constantinople to negotiate with the Byzantine emperor against the encroaching Normans. A. continued on to Palestine with the bishop of Palestrina. Returning to Constantinople, he was left there as a hostage by Gisulf, to his great dismay. He escaped and took refuge with Robert Guiscard. Reconciled with Gisulf, he returned to Salerno. He again participated in the councils of Melfi (1067), Salerno (1068), and the very important one of 1074 in Rome, under the new pope Gregory VII.
When the Pope was forced to ally with the Normans as they besieged Salerno (1076), the archbishop had to leave the city, but he was able to return in December of that same year, when, with the decline of Lombard rule, it became the capital of Robert Guiscard’s domain. With Guiscard’s help he erected the monumental basilica in honor of St. Matthew the Apostle, whose relics he had recently discovered; the basilica was later consecrated by the exiled pope Gregory VII, whom A. welcomed and comforted. Both died in 1085: Gregory on 25 May, A. in October, and both rest in the same cathedral.
A. was succeeded by Alfano II (1086), who seems to have been a relative.
Works (some in PL 147, 1213–82). - A., as the Cassinese chronicler attests (Chron., III, 35), was “a man most learned in the holy Scriptures and fully instructed in the knowledge of ecclesiastical dogmas”; he possessed “no small knowledge of the art of medicine” and “remarkable skill in singing” (ibid., III, 7). In all these sciences he left writings, most of which unfortunately are lost.
1. Theology and hagiography
There survive the Vita et passio s. Christinae, a passage of which (PL 147, 1275 B) also reveals A.’s serious legal training; and a Sermon on the vocation of the apostle St. Matthew.His treatise De unione Verbi Dei et hominis, of which a copy was once preserved at Montecassino, has been lost. Likewise lost seems to be a Vita s. Sabinae.
2. Medicine
We possess his translation from the Greek of Nemesius of Emesa’s treatise On the Nature of Man (Περί φύσεως ἀνθρώπου: PG 40, 503–518; partly among the works of St. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima: PG 45, 187–222), to which he added a Prologus in which he gives the work of Nemesius the title Premnon physicon, “that is, The Stock of Natural Things”: a philosophical and physiological treatise whose medical doctrine was analyzed by R. Creutz. This elegant version by A.—one of the several that the treatise had in the Middle Ages—is missing in Migne; edited in 1887 by Holzinger, it appeared in 1917 in a new critical edition, among the “Teubner” classics of Leipzig, edited by Carlo Burkhard.Pietro Capparoni has restored the Tractatus de pulsibus according to ms. 1024 of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris (noted in 1930 by Ernesto Wickersheimer) and ms. lat. 1143 of the Vatican (Rome 1936, with commentary and facsimiles of the codices). A precious document of the early Salernitan school, the little work—probably complete rather than a mere scholarly excerpt—is an epitome “on the pulses” according to Galen’s writings; it greatly influenced Gilles of Corbeil.
A. also wrote a work of clinical and therapeutic medicine, De quattuor humoribus corporis humani: an extensive treatise, in at least seven parts, of which codex 73 of the Laurentian Library in Florence preserves a very important fragment (known to S. Renzi, Coll. Salernitana, II, Naples 1854, pp. 411–12, and republished by R. Creutz in Stud. u. Mitt. z. Gesch. des Bened. Ordens, 47 [1929], pp. 420–22), while ms. F 86 (13th–14th c.) of the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome offers a kind of summary, discovered by P. Capparoni and edited by him with commentary and facsimile (Rome 1928). This excerpt, made by scholars at the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century, shows how more than two centuries after A.’s death his writings were still used as textbooks.
Capparoni believes that the De unione corporis et animae, thought to be lost, is nothing other than the homonymous chapter of his translation of Nemesius.
We are thus now well informed about A.’s medical profile, one of the principal pre-scholastic masters of the School, and about his scientific activity, carried out within the tradition of classical Greek and Latin learning, by which Salerno earned the name Civitas Hippocratica.
3. But A. owes his greatest fame to poetry. He composed, says Peter the Deacon (Chron. Casin., III, 35), a book of hymns and verses: all his verses were written in classical meters (a notable feature in an age when rhythmic verse was everywhere prevalent).
His poems, most of which are contained in codices 47 and 280 of Montecassino, can be divided into two groups: those on sacred or edifying subjects (the Virgin, the Holy Innocents, the heroism of the Martyrs) and those of a personal or occasional nature (epitaphs, epistles, dedications, etc.). Particularly noteworthy are: the long ode, in dactylic trimeters, to Montecassino; the Sapphic verses in honor of St. Matthew and St. Maurus; the hymn to St. Sabina, in alternating glyconic and asclepiadean meters, with a sweet description of paradise as an eternal spring; the hexameter poem in honor of the Twelve Brothers of Benevento, described as a novel in verse; and the ode to Hildebrand, in glyconic rhythm, in which he extols the greatness of Rome, mistress of the world (cf. Peter the Deacon, De viris ill. casin., 19).
A. is “one of the few literary figures of the Middle Ages” (Prampolini). As poet and scholar, as shepherd and statesman, he is one of the most representative figures of the 11th century. His beneficent and penitent life earned him, though without formal cult, the title of saint.