ALFANO (Alphanus), Archbishop of Salerno. - Theologian, philosopher, physician, poet. Born in Salerno to a most noble family, between 1015 and 1020, died 9 October 1085, he lived in the golden period of his homeland, a witness to the greatness to which Gualmaro V raised that principality. When a palace conspiracy, in which his own brothers were implicated (cf. Chron. Casin., III, 7), extinguished that Lombard prince in blood (3 June 1052), he mourned his tragic end as the loss of the "pater patriae" and "of every ornament of life" (cf. the elegy ad Guidonem: PL 147, 1257).
He was directed toward the priesthood, and studied at the famous local medical school, becoming one of its finest glories. "Medicus et clericus," he formed in Salerno a friendship with Desiderius, whom he treated for exhaustion and weakness of the stomach; and drawn by him to the monastic ideal, he entered with him the monastery of St. Sophia in Benevento (1054). He then moved on to Montecassino (1056), where with Desiderius and Frederick of Lorraine, likewise learned and literary 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 there the Benedictine monastery and, in 1058, the archdiocese. He was consecrated by his august friend, Stephen X.
His episcopate marked for the Church of Salerno a period of splendor. He reorganized the Chapter, enriching it with numerous privileges obtained from the Pope and the prince. In 1059 he took part in the councils of Rome, Melfi and Benevento. In these solemn assemblies he formed a friendship with Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, whose plans for ecclesiastical reform he shared, and whose efforts in the struggle for the liberty of the Church he seconded (cf. the carmen Ad Hildebrandum).
He took part in the great events of his troubled time. In 1062 he accompanied his prince Gisulf
II who, simulating a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, went to Constantinople to negotiate with the Byzantine emperor against the encroaching Normans. A. continued, with the bishop of Palestrina, on to Palestine. Returned to Constantinople, he was left there by Gisulf, to his sad surprise, as a hostage. Having escaped, he took refuge with Robert Guiscard. Reconciled with Gisulf, he returned to Salerno. He again took part in the councils of Melfi (1067), of Salerno (1068) and in the very important one of 1074 in Rome, under the new pope Gregory VII.
When the Pope was forced to ally himself with the Normans, and these besieged Salerno (1076), the archbishop had to leave it, and was able to re-enter the city in December of that same year, when, with the Lombard principality at an end, it became the capital of the dominion of Robert Guiscard. And with Robert's help he raised the monumental basilica in honor of St. Matthew the Apostle, whose relics he had shortly before rediscovered: a basilica later consecrated by the exiled pontiff Gregory VII, whom A. received 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 was, it seems, his relative.
WORKS (some in PL 147, 1213-82). - A., attests the Cassinese chronicler (Chron., III, 35), was "vir in Scripturis sanctis eruditissimus et notitia ecclesiasticorum dogmatum ad plenum instructus"; he had "medicinae artis scientiam non parvam" and "miram cantandi peritiam" (ibid., III, 7). And he left, in all these sciences, writings, the greater part of which unfortunately is lost.
1. Theology and hagiography
There survive the Vita et passio s. Christiane, a passage of which (PL 147, 1275 B) also reveals A.'s serious legal formation; and a Sermon on the vocation of the apostle St. Matthew.
His treatise De unione Verbi Dei et hominis, of which a copy was formerly preserved at Montecassino, has gone astray. Likewise lost seems to be a Vita s. Sabinae.
2. Medicine
We possess his translation from the Greek of the treatise of Nemesius of Emesa On the nature of man (Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου: PG 40, 503-818; in part among the works of St. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima: PG 45, 187-222), to which he added a Prologus in which he gives Nemesius' work the title Premonon physicon, "hoc est Stipes naturalium": a philosophical and physiological treatise, whose medical doctrine was analyzed by R. Creutz. This elegant version of A. - one of the several that the treatise had in the Middle Ages - is lacking in Migne; edited in 1887 by Holzinger, it appeared in 1917 in a new critical edition, among the "Teubner" classics of Leipzig, edited by Karl Burkhard.
Pietro Capparoni has given us back the Tractatus de pulsibus according to ms. 1024 of the Bibl. de l'Arsenal in Paris (noted in 1930 by Ernest Wickersheimer) and ms. lat. 1143 of the Vatican (Rome 1936, with commentary and facsimile of the codices). A precious document of the early Salernitan school, the opuscule - probably complete, rather than a mere scholastic abridgment - is an epitome "on the pulses" according to the sphygmic writings of Galen: it greatly influenced Giles of Corbeil.
A. also wrote a work of clinical medicine and therapeutics, De quattuor humoribus corporis humani: a broad treatise, of at least seven parts, of which cod. 73 of the Bibl. Laurenziana in Florence preserves a very important fragment (known to S. Renzi, Coll. Salernitana, II, Naples 1854, p. 411 ff., 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 cent.) of the Bibl. Vallicelliana in Rome gives a kind of synthesis of it, discovered by P. Capparoni, and edited by him with commentary and facsimile (Rome 1928). This summary, made by pupils at the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th, 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 chapter of the same name in his translation of Nemesius.
We are therefore now informed about the medical figure of A., one of the principal pre-Constantinian masters of the School, and about his scientific activity, carried on in the furrow of the classical Greco-Latin tradition, through which Salerno could call itself Civitas Hippocratica.
3. But A. owes his greater celebrity to poetry. He composed, says Peter the Deacon (Chron. Casin., III, 35), librum hymnorum et versuum: verses all written in classical meters (a notable peculiarity in a period in which rhythmic verses prevail everywhere).
His poems, for the most part contained in codd. 47 and 280 of Montecassino, can be distinguished into two groups: those on a sacred or edifying subject (the Virgin, the Holy Innocents, the heroism of the Martyrs) and those of a personal or occasional character (epitaphs, letters, dedications, etc.). Particularly to be remembered are: the long ode, in dactylic trimeters, to Montecassino; the Sapphics in honor of St. Matthew and St. Maurus; the hymn to St. Sabina, in alternating glyconic and asclepiadean verses, with a gentle description of paradise, eternal spring; the poem in hexameters in honor of the XII brothers of Benevento, defined as a novel in verse; the ode to Hildebrand, in glyconic rhythm, in which the greatness of Rome, mistress of the world, is exalted (cf. Peter the Deacon, De viris ill. casin., 19).
A. is "one of the few literary characters of the Middle Ages" (Prampolini). As poet and scholar, as pastor and politician, he is one of the most representative figures of the 11th century. His beneficent and penitent life has earned him, though without cult, the title of saint.